As substitute English forward Ollie Watkins kicked the winning goal in the fading minutes of the UEFA European Football Championship semi-finals between England and the Netherlands, a euphoric wave rushed through the crowd. Watching the scene at the Sports Bar and Grill in London’s Marylebone neighbourhood on Wednesday, I realized that, as significant as this match may have been, a far more historic event occurred on Sunday.
That’s the day a European Union mandate went into effect decreeing that all new cars sold in Europe must have Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA). The British press has dubbed ISA “mandatory speed limiters.”
Driving here and on the continent will never be the same. We’re sure to see similar measures in North America.
ISA was created to reduce speed-related deaths. It uses GPS, satellite navigation and traffic sign-recognition cameras to determine if drivers are exceeding the speed limit and, in some versions, warns them to slow down though audio, visual and haptic (touch) signals.
In other versions, ISA “Speed Control” cuts the torque once the speed limit is reached and is currently in the European Ford Focus, Galaxy and S-Max. “Haptic Pedals” essentially push back against your foot, making it more difficult to press down on the accelerator. This can be overridden by pushing harder on the throttle.
Proponents maintain ISA will save more than 25,000 lives and prevent at least 140,000 serious injuries by 2038. To those who call it a mandatory speed limiter, ISA is a nagging passenger who hectors drivers every time they go a tad over the speed limit.
British drivers who hoped Brexit would spare them have been disappointed. While exempt, most U.K. vehicle manufacturers will adopt the same standards as their European counterparts. According to Driving Monitor, “With many vehicles sold in the U.K. having EU specification software in place, the reality is that it’s easier to produce one singular variant rather than having a completely different model purely for the U.K. The reality is that manufacturers tend to prefer to cater to the most complex market and with the EU rules being more stringent, it’s highly likely that most manufacturers will design vehicles with that in mind.”
According to the regulation, ISA can be turned off but cannot be permanently deactivated. Each manufacturer has a different method for turning ISA off. Most manufacturers, such as Volkswagen, require the driver to turn off ISA every time the vehicle is switched on. Disabling it permanently is difficult, and some believe the “fix” will soon become illegal in the United Kingdom.
Some British drivers are not happy. Birmingham Live reported the following feedback:
- “My speed limiter is fitted to the bottom of my right leg and has proved 100-per-cent reliable over 60 years and a million miles of motoring.”
- “Next it will be the government restricting how far you can travel and when you can use your car, and if you don’t conform, we will switch it off, just more control over our lives.”
- “So, we have come out of the EU, but still have to follow its rules?”
- “I thought the reason we left was to take back control of our own country? We get none of the benefits of being in it, i.e. no red tape on EU travel, just the bad stuff.”
While knee jerk and ironic (Brexit’s slogan may as well have been “None of the benefits. Just the bad stuff”), the resistance to ISA has some merit. Intelligent Speed Assistance is not a cure-all. For instance, ISA can’t tell the difference between going five kilometres an hour over the speed limit and going 50 over. The European Automobile Manufacturers Association maintains that ISA registers too “many false warnings due to incorrect or outdated speed-limit information and differences in road signs and digital maps.”
ISA may also create its own types of dangerous behaviour.
Academics Gemma Briggs (Open University), Helen Wells (Kent University) and Leane Savigar-Shaw (Keele University), wrote a compelling piece for The Conversation.
They argued that ISA’s need to break driving behaviour into a reductive binary can cause other safety problems. “You need to reduce complex driving behaviour to dichotomies of ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous.’ Technology needs to be told which behaviour triggers which response in simple, binary terms as it cannot (yet) handle ifs and buts and context. But the risk is that this may encourage us to believe that 30 miles an hour (48 kilometres an hour), for example, is inherently safe, even when 20 mph (32 km/h), or even less, might have been the safer choice.”
The fact that drivers can switch off ISA, but not permanently, could prove intensely annoying. I’m not a speed demon, but I could not stand such a device in my car. The easiest way to get me to stop driving would be to have ISA yammering at me any time I went three kilometres an hour over the limit.
Some see ISA as the death knell for driving as we know it. Steve Gooding of the RAC Foundation, said “I think many motorists will tire of switching it off and they will just learn to live with it … Arguably ISA will mark the beginning of the end of a world in which people choose their cars on the basis of its top speed and the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour. It’s a sign of things to come. Increasingly, the car is going to decide what you can and can’t do.”
If England wins the Euro 2024 final against Spain on Sunday, it will be the first time they hoist a trophy since the World Cup in 1966. It would be a historic day for English sport to end a weird and unsettling week in English driving. European Rules Football (soccer) will remain pure, at least until someone in the tech industry creates Intelligent Goal Assistance.