No more speeding tickets? The tech which is going to make you slow down
Want to avoid any more speed awareness courses or £100 speeding tickets? From July 6 most new cars on sale in Britain will cajole drivers who are travelling faster than the speed limit to slow down.
Rather like the warning emitted if you forget to put on your seatbelt, there will be a beep, the steering wheel will vibrate or — if all else fails — the accelerator will automatically push back if you do not slow down.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, an independent research organisation, said the new intelligent speed assistance (ISA) system will represent “the beginning of the end of that world when people choose their cars on the basis of its top speed and the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 60mph”.
Increasingly, he said, “the car is going to decide what you can and can’t do”.
New cars will be equipped with the ISA system, which is intended to reduce collisions by 30 per cent and deaths by 20 per cent, according to the European Transport Safety Council. There were 1,711 reported deaths in collisions on British roads in 2022.
The anti-speeding technology will be mandatory in all new cars sold in the EU and Northern Ireland.
In Britain the government decided not to adopt ISA as mandatory, but it will still be installed in most new cars. A driver will be able to choose not to use it but they will have to do this every time they start the car. It cannot be permanently switched off.
There were 1,711 reported deaths in collisions on British roads in 2022
Gooding said: “I think many motorists will tire of switching off ISA and they will just learn to live with it.”
The technology will represent a profound shift in our 140-year relationship with the motorcar. Many speeding drivers are not aware of it, particularly in areas where the speed limit changes often.
Edmund King, president of the AA, said: “ISA should be incredibly beneficial, particularly for those driving in urban areas trying to stay safe and avoid tickets when speed limits often vary every 500m and jump between 40mph, 30mph and 20mph.”
Richard Cuerden, a senior executive at TRL, a transport research group that helped to develop ISA and used to be part of the Department for Transport, predicts that 90 per cent of new cars sold in Britain will include the system as standard.
Cars that do not have it will receive lower scores from the influential Euro NCAP safety system, which many drivers rely on when buying a new car.
Some carmakers, such as Ford, have already embraced the technology, seeing it as a logical development from existing devices that set a maximum speed limit on a vehicle. In 2015 it launched a version of ISA that smoothly slows down the car by restricting fuel supplied to the engine and automatically brakes if the driver does not respond to warnings. Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes and Volvo have also fitted variants of ISA.
Speeding offences in England and Wales have increased at a faster rate in the past decade than the amount of traffic, with more than 2.8 million speeding offences detected in England and Wales in 2021, according to the Home Office.
Steve McNamara, who as general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association represents London’s black-cab drivers, said the majority of cabbies were already using a less sophisticated speed-limiting device. “If the limit is 20 miles an hour, press the button on the dashboard and the cab won’t drive any faster than 20mph, no matter how hard you push the pedal,” he said.
Many taxi drivers fear they will lose their livelihood if they are caught inadvertently driving at 25mph in a 20mph limit and receive three penalty points each time on their licence.
Even those motorists who prefer to trust their own judgment will soon notice the impact of ISA on the traffic around them. Half of the 8,900-strong fleet of buses operated by Transport for London are using ISA, and it hopes to fit it to all of them by 2030.
The presence of thousands of vehicles that strictly obey all speed limits is already slowing down the rest of the traffic. A study found an increase in “platooning” from vehicles stuck behind buses led to a reduction in average speeds in 20mph zones, with a marginal increase in journey times.