All new vehicles sold in the European Union and Northern Ireland from 6 July will be fitted with intelligent speed assistance (ISA).
In Britain, the new technology is not mandatory but is likely to be fitted to the vast majority of vehicles.
The system will emit a beep or the steering wheel will vibrate if it detects the speed limit is being broken. As a final measure, the accelerator will automatically push back if the driver does not slow down.
According to the European Transport Safety Council, the system could reduce collisions by 30% and deaths by 20%. In Great Britain in recent years, there have been around 1,700 road deaths annually.
While it is not mandatory to comply with the European regulation – General Vehicle Safety Regulation (EU) 2019/2144 – as many as 90% of new vehicles in Britain could be fitted with the technology, due to the nature of the international motor trade.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, told The Times that the system represents 'the beginning of the end of that world when people choose their cars based on its top speed and the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 60mph'.
He added that increasingly, 'the car is going to decide what you can and can’t do'.
However, Simon Morgan of Buchanan Computing and an IHE committee chair raised concerns about the support systems for the ISA.
He said: 'This technology can only work if the car has a reliable way of determining the speed limit. This is certainly not the case at the moment but might be in a few years' time with DfT's D-TRO [digital traffic regulation orders] project.
'Digital traffic orders (D-TRO) will be a game changer. I support the concept enthusiastically, and we have been advocating them at Buchanan Computing since the 1990s, and achieved them for speed limits for Transport for London covering the whole GLA area over 15 years ago.'
Drivers can choose to turn the system off but they will have to do this every time they start the car. It cannot be permanently switched off.
The ISA system is required to work with the driver and not to restrict his/her possibility to act in any moment during driving. The driver is always in control and can easily override the ISA system.
The ISA regulation provides four options for systems feedback to the driver, from which car manufacturers will be free to choose from:
- cascaded acoustic warning
- cascaded vibrating warning
- haptic feedback through the acceleration pedal
- speed control function
The first two feedback options do not directly intervene but only provide warnings (first optic and if no response from the driver, a delayed acoustic/vibrating warning), which have to be as short as possible in duration to avoid potential annoyance of the driver.
The other possible feedback relies on the pedal restoring force – it will push the driver’s foot gently back to make the driver aware and help to slow down. The driver can ignore this feedback and override the system by pushing slightly harder on the acceleration pedal.
Even in the case of the speed control function, where the car speed will be automatically gently reduced, the system can be smoothly overridden by the driver by pressing the accelerator pedal a little bit deeper.
