I think Audi maps uses google maps, at least that’s what I remember the Audi dealership telling me. I’m sure other brands probably collab with google maps too.
Yes, they are usually well-signed if the issue is the driver knowing what the speed limit is.
If the issue is the car forcibly preventing the driver from going over the speed limit in spite of the driver’s desire to exceed the speed limit, as is the very subject of this thread, then it will only work to the extent that the car knows what the speed limit is.
And most of the scenarios where it would be most beneficial to force people to drive the speed limit are the very scenarios where it is least likely to be accurate.
Is this thought experiment just for highways? Cuz I absolutely want it to be illegal to go 60 in my neighborhood.
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I disagree. I think it would be dangerous for those cars that have electronic controls to suddenly slow the cars as long as there are any manually driven cars on the road.
I also reject the idea of the car having a regulator that prevents it from going over the speed limit in general, because I think that’s sometimes done for safety reasons. But I think it’s a particularly bad idea for construction and such, at least until manual driving is prohibited.
I do think speed limits could be raised in most of the country, as the OP suggests.
This is the prisoner’s dilemma with two equilibria. As long as there’s manually driven cars on the road, AV cannot operate at max utility. As soon as the last manually driven car is off the road, then every car can basically operate at close to max speed simultaneously and speed limit is meaningless.
Construction and situational speed limits can be easily communicated to all cars electronically.
If a car provides a speed that is too high for a construction zone, it is still the driver’s responsibility to follow the construction zone signs. The governor sets a maximum speed, not a minimum speed.
The state of the art cars have two ways of knowing the speed limit. They can use maps and they can read speed limit signs. Your car may only have one. If there is a discrepancy, the car can say “I’m not limiting your speed” and drop the governor or use the higher speed for the governor. When that happens, the car sends a message to the map manager and the map manager pursues the problem. With construction zones, if the map hasn’t been updated, there will be many cars sending the same message. My state’s DOT publishes construction zone information. Map managers responsible to tens of millions of cars will be up to date on using that information.
Also, drivers can have a button that sends a speed limit complaint. Again, if it’s a real problem, many drivers will be pushing the button at the same spot.
I’ve seen proposals for dedicating the left most lane on multilane roads for that purpose.
But, again, AV is turning out to be far more difficult than early proponents imagined.
I agree with all of that.
I was accepting the hypothetical presented in the OP, in spite of not particularly wanting to go there.
You haven’t really refuted anything I said.
This is an important pre-requisite, and I am more pessimistic than you on the ease of accomplishing it.
Sure, but if it’s not going to add benefit in the most critical scenario then it’s practically pointless to implement it only in less critical situations, and perhaps even counter-productive.
Maybe on the highway, but I don’t think you could change the speed limits dramatically on most roads because of the risk of hitting a child who enters the street even with instantaneous reaction time.
I guess I see your posts as orthogonal to the main discussion. There’s the big issue of speed limits. Do they make sense in general? How should they be enforced? Would it make sense to design cars to enforce the speed limits?
Then you brought up a (imo) minor issue of temporary low-speed areas due to construction. This isn’t a thread about full-blown autonomous cars, just about speed limits. We don’t need to solve every possible case of speed limits in any one way.
I don’t really disagree with what you posted. I just don’t think it’s central to the question CS brought up.
I thought the discussion was about whether cars should have a “feature” that prevents drivers from going over the posted speed limit.
In my opinion, that’s major. If the car isn’t going to get critical low-speed speed limits right where drivers will be particularly likely to both disobey and endanger others then there’s not much benefit to forcing them to drive slower than they want to in less critical situations.
If your point is how big of a deal it is that your car gets the speed limit wrong when it is using that data for the sole purpose of providing you information, then yeah… construction zones are no biggie.
We started with:
I don’t think anyone thinks that construction limits are arbitrary and should be eliminated. I also didn’t expect anyone to think that we need to mechanically enforce them, as they are more respected than the “main” speed limits.
Limiter would be dangerous on two lane country roads.It’s much safer to exceed the speed limit to pass than to slowly pass someone while in the oncoming traffic lane.
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I almost never pass in those situations. If it’s a very slow moving farm truck or something, maybe - but if the person in front is fairly close to the speed limit, I’ll just suck it up and go slower than I want to.
But - yeah - if you are going to pass, it’s much safer to do it as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they aren’t is the thing. In a 55 some people dawdle at 45 (or less). If everyone waits behind them it creates quite the backlog.
By that reasoning, I shouldn’t get the Covid vaccine because it doesn’t protect against heart attacks.
“Most of the time” is valuable.
And, I think I showed how construction zones would rapidly get the correct speed, even if there was some communication failure between the state DOTs and the map manager (which would probably be a rare event).