Speed Limiters for cars

Stuff reports from Reuters:

Cars should be fitted with devices to regulate their speed to cut fatal accidents by a quarter, a UK government advisory body said.

The UK Commission for Integrated Transport and the Motorists’ Forum said the voluntary use of so-called intelligent speed adaption would cut 40,000 road deaths over a 60-year period.

The proposed system would automatically slow the engine and apply the brakes to keep a car within local speed limits, although the driver would be able to override the limiter.

It said the limiters would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6 per cent on roads where cars go at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.

The commission called on the UK’s Department of Transport to start building a database of road speed limit maps which would be needed to operate the system.

Are these people stupid? Every GPS vehicle device in the UK already has a database of speed limit maps. MY GPS has it for UK, France and NZ. So if they are ignorant of this fact, how much can we trust them on anything else?

Also note the 40,000 road deaths are over 60 years, so that is 667 a year out of a population of 60 million or around 1 in 100,000.

Personally I think the future will have GPS fitted in almost every car, and a cruise control option so that it can cruise at the maximum speed. The anti-collision technology is some way off, but we already have parts of it with the beeping as you reverse if you are about to hit something.