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“But what are they doing making such fast cars if – at most – you can only go at 130?” The eternal question that is never answered in the USA is about to find its definitive solution. A bill has been filed in New York which – if approved – would oblige all motorists to fit their cars with a special device that limits the maximum speed to five miles per hour above the indicated limit.
The system has already been mounted on several cars for extensive tests and it has been discovered that with these devices installed on board, drivers respect the speed limit 99% of the time, without the system ever having to come into operation. For this reason, in its definitive version, we are thinking of a rule that first requires the installation of a black box that records violations of the limits and then, if the motorist was particularly undisciplined (11 violations in 18 months) then the obligation would be triggered to mount the automatic lock on board.
The spirit of the law is commendable because a study by the NHTSA, the US federal road safety agency, shows that 30 percent of road accidents in New York result from speeding and that in the city there has been an increase in appalling pedestrian fatalities: 59 fatal accidents in the first quarter of the year and 131 in the first half of this year.
The point is that such a system is impossible to apply in Italy where speed limits are placed without any logic. Often, in fact, we go from 110 to 70 suddenly, from 50 to 30 without warning or from 90 to 50 in a heartbeat. We are not in America and to understand what’s going on, all you need to do is activate Traffic Sign Recognition (the recognition of road signs) which interacts with the adaptive cruise control. A system now already present on many latest generation cars: thus reading the vertical road signs allows the electronics to regulate the speed of the car automatically.
Well, after a few kilometers of operation the system throws any driver into panic: the car suddenly stops in the center of the road, in the overtaking lane, with the risk of causing a rear-end collision. Yes, because in addition to the problems linked to signs placed without logic, there are also the frequent signs placed to reduce speed on certain sections of the road, for example because they are affected by works, with incredible limits of 15 or even 10. Traffic sign recognition it works well, intelligent cars follow the indications of the signs with precision, but if the signs are not rational, logical, orderly and credible it all becomes useless.
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