Don’t worry you’ll be able to still get a speeding ticket regardless of whatever crapware they load up into the car.

Anything that makes vehicles more expensive makes them less accessible. This hurts the poorest people first and hardest since the most affordable housing also tends to have the worst car commutes and the worst access to transit. It also sounds a “great” way to crowdsource surveillance since implementing something like this would require cars to have cameras to look at speed signs, or a database of roads and speed limits and a way to locate itself to compare the two.

If you truly cared about this you'd be fighting for smaller cars, pedestrian friendly roads, both technological and administrative enforcement of speed limits, open firmwares, repairability and documentation on cars.

Technical speed limit enforcement absolutely can be done in a way that respects autonomy and privacy. A car can have a camera, a one way data link for maps, a gps, and/or a transponder for signals from speed limit signs preventing it from exceeding the default speed limit without a positive signal/mapped limit or active intervention from the user. None of these things require an uplink, and if you cared about autonomy, privacy, cost, and safety you'd be pushing for such a solution as well as actually caring about the telemetry in almost all new cars without these features.

Cars are costly primarily because they are much bigger, much heavier, and much harder to maintain than they need to be. If one didn't have to deal with the near certainty of getting t-boned by a ford ranger or suv doing 20 over the limit in one's lifetime then a microcar capable of 40km/h with a simple lap belt would be safer than the average 1.5t sedan full of airbags (and the requisite limitations on user maintenance) is now. Additionally with options other than lugging around 2-4t of steel and plastic and covering half the city in vast seas of asphalt available, 80% of people would get to their destinations faster.

Thanks for letting me know I don't truly care

The poorest are least likely to own a car, and likely to be reliant on walking and cycling which are directly negatively impacted by speeding motorists.

They're also more likely to live next to major roads, again negatively impacted by speeding motorists.

I've been driving through The Netherlands recently. It's so scary how everybody drives so close to each other because of the speed limit 100kph during the day. Bumper to bumper. I feel less safe on the highway in The Netherlands than at the race track with no speed limit.

Feeling less safe is only weakly correlated with being less safe. We're not very good judges of risk. Urban "traffic calming" design attempts to exploit this by trying to engineer roads that feel claustrophobic, causing drivers to slow down.

Since kinetic energy is a square of velocity, slowing cars down - even a little - both significantly increases the chance of surviving a crash and also makes it more likely you'll stop in time to avoid the crash in the first place.

Also interestingly, lower limits often reduce congestion and increase total road capacity. I'm not sure how safety at the race track works out, but skilled, predictable drivers in well maintained vehicles with race marshalls and huge run off areas probably makes any comparison awkward.

> Also interestingly, lower limits often reduce congestion and increase total road capacity.

Exactly. People driving closer and paying even less attention because “driving slower”. Lack of attention and driving skill is what leads to accidents, not speed. I do need to say, though, the speed limit in the city, between pedestrians, I personally treat as saint. But outside of the city, especially when there’s almost nobody around, well, that depends but never reckless.

> I'm not sure how safety at the race track works out, but skilled, predictable drivers in well maintained vehicles with race marshalls and huge run off areas probably makes any comparison awkward.

The only race track I’m familiar with, is the Nordschleife. Not much run offs there.

That's around the top limit in most US cities. I don't see how tailgating is an outcome of driving at the limit.

The problem is, the way I see it, everyone wants to be one car ahead. So they all try to push each other out of the way.

It wasn’t like that when the limit was higher. Lower limit, people tend to get closer.

I don’t see this _so often_ in Germany, neither in Belgium.

They're supposed to keep 2 seconds distance. (At 100 km/h that's ~28m or so) . Is that not the actual distance kept?

Definitely not. 28 meters is roughly 5 car length. That’s not what I experience in The Netherlands, especially during rush hour. Bumper to bumper with zero visibility two cars ahead.

Erm, 100 km/h / (3.6 (km/h)/(m/s)) * 2 sec ≈ 56 m. (And the rule of thumb you learn in driving school is dividing the speed in km/h by two.)

Where do you live that you can safely drive at the speed limit?

If you tried that on an interstate in the US, you would end up with annoyed semi trucks tailgating you, and passing motorists might assume that you are impaired.

Not the OP, I live in Europe and mostly drive under limits as well, don't like collecting tickets.

When I don't, usually I get a greetings postcard from a radar.

In Phoenix, which isn't known for its quiet traffic.

> "The objective is to protect Europeans against [...] climate change, empower them with new mobility solutions that match their changing needs"

> "[T]here is no reason why these standards can't be reviewed and updated in the near future. We think that is essential,"

The goal is to discourage driving over time by making vehicles prohibitively expensive, by posting lower and lower speed limits over time due to "climate change", and to continually revise the standards to separate people from their ability to leave their homes as quickly and permanently as they can convince their populace to accept.

Or just prevent driving entirely after curfew/to areas where illegal protests are being held/if there is a warrant out for your arrest. Once your car taking orders from someone else is normalized, anything can happen.

The bicycle won't take orders though. Europe is not as car reliant as the US.