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From July 7th all new cars sold in the EU have to have Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) technology.
ISA uses satellite and digital mapping data to judge the speed of vehicles.
If the speed is judged excessive, ISA will tell the car to either make a noise, trigger vibration, deliver haptic responses through the accelerator pedal or activate a speed limiter.
Soothingly the EC states: “Even in the case of speed control function, where the car speed will be automatically gently reduced, the system can be smoothly overridden by the driver by pressing the accelerator pedal a little bit deeper.”
That’s for now – but do you think that’s where it ends?
There is supposed to be an off-switch for this ‘feature’, but it defaults to On every time you restart the car.
Soon we will be in an autonomous car, so who cares?
For decades there will be plenty of ‘old beaters’ for those that want to avoid this mandate.
Of course you can expect insurance for those cars to go up dramatically.
yay comments work again!
I’m not sure that’s entirely correct. One of the big drivers for the huge increase in UK car insurance rates (leaving aside greedy government insurance premium taxes) is the increasing cost of new tech in cars and the decreasing lifespan of these cars. Remember, an electronic stability control unit MOT failure can write off your car – for a feature you may never have used, but is mandatory. We should rationally expect the “beater” premiums to stay lower – anything that fails is a) lower value to start with and b) usually cheaper to fix and if not c) the write off cost is far, far lower.
Exactly the same with modern bicycles. We’re getting increasingly marginal gains for exponentially increasing cost and increasingly planned obsolescence.
I notice the insurance company I’m with now won’t cover EVs due to the high cost of repair, not even covering me if I’m driving somebody else’s EV whereas I have temporary cover on high performance cars.
But the government is also adding to costs by trying to classify cars heavily modified for competition or otherwise as new vehicles so you have to pay their registration fees again for a Q plate.