If you choose, you can ignore speed limits entirely, at the risk of fines, loss of license, and possible incarceration. In Washington state, though, authorities won’t be asking repeat offenders to play nice anymore. They’ll be making speeders obey the law with technology.
As covered by Washington State Standard, Governor Bob Ferguson signed the new bill into law on Monday. House Bill 1596 will mandate the installation of speed limiting devices for drivers on restricted licenses who have previously had their licenses suspended for excess speed or reckless driving. Installation of a device may also be mandated by judges under various circumstances, such as a condition of probation.
Efforts to pass the bill were driven by a speeding-related crash in King County last year that claimed four lives. The legislation received bipartisan support amidst a broader push to stem casualties on the state’s roads. From the Washington State Standard:
The new law is known as the BEAM Act, named after four people killed in a crash last year with a speeding driver near Renton: Boyd Buster Brown, Eloise Wilcoxson, Andrea Smith Hudson and Matilda Wilcoxson.
[…]
The driver was held up as an example of someone who would’ve needed to install a speed limiter. In the prior 10 months, he had reportedly been involved in two crashes in which his speeding was a factor.
Technologically, the system works in a straightforward fashion somewhat akin to drink-driving interlock devices. It uses GPS to determine the car’s position and speed, comparing it to the posted speed limit on the road in question. If the driver attempts to exceed the local speed limit, the device intervenes electronically to lock out further acceleration. It appears the devices likely interface with the vehicle via the OBD-II port, which would prevent their use on older vehicles.
The device was tested in a demonstration for local media upon the bill’s passing. “If I’m in a 25 (mile per hour) residential area, and I want to go past 35 or 34 or 30, depending on how it’s set, I literally can’t do it,” Representative Mari Leavitt told the media. “I can push my foot on the pedal as hard as I want to and I just can’t.” Leavitt was a prime sponsor of the bill.
For drivers with a history of excessive speeding and moving violations, the bill states that a driver may have to use an “intelligent speed assistance device” for 120 days after receiving a restricted license post-suspension. Those with reckless driving charges will see that rise to 150 days. Driving during this period without such a device is a traffic infraction that incurs 30 days of license suspension. These provisions will go into effect from January 1, 2029.
As we’ve explored previously (and it’s worth reading Thomas’s story, since it includes his opinions of the pro/cons of the tech; numerous commenters in that post express concern about the device’s ability to be defeated), the device is intended to prevent repeat speeders from reoffending, in place of more stringent measures such as outright driving bans, which could make it difficult for the driver to get to work in a nation not known for its public transportation. Similar to many alcohol interlock laws, drivers will be responsible for paying for the installation and maintenance of the device out of their own pocket. There is also a workaround provision if the device mistakes the posted local speed limit; drivers will be able to manually overrule the device three times per month.
Washington state isn’t the only one exploring such legislation. Similar bills have passed in Virginia and Georgia, while Washington, D.C. approved legislation for a “speed governor” program last year.
These days, the technology to implement such speed limiters is affordable and accessible. Indeed, jurisdictions like Europe are even exploring implementing the technology on all vehicles across the board. Expect other states to pay close attention to what Washington is doing. If it proves popular and effective, it’s entirely possible that politicians may pursue similar legislation around the nation.
Image credits: FOX 13 Seattle via screenshot
So we’re doing guns when?
My 12 year old Fiesta has “MyKey” which allows you to program the spare fob with reduced speed and variopus other things to annoy a child or spousal unit. I have never tried it as it sounds like a way to mess up a spare key for my one driver car.
Good!
I don’t object to this at all, just as I’ve got no problem with mandating installation of breathalyzer/interlocks for chronic DUI violators, though I’m sure some of the more clever repeat offenders will figure workarounds.
Frankly, I think drivers licenses ought to be revoked permanently after X number of DUI/reckless/excessive speed violations… I suspect a relatively small number of repeat offenders are responsible for a disproportionately large % of violations/accidents, especially re: drunk drivers.
In Europe similar tech is optional on currently produced vehicles – ASLD automatic speed limiting device – it’s like a cruise control that you can set to not exceed speed limits (i.e. a max threshold) vs a regular cruise control (a min threshold) whether through geolocating the road or through traffic sign recognition. Of course, the demand for such tech is higher there becuase of the high frequency of traffic cameras.
other ideas vis a vis the article:
1) insurance company must require the device for the speeder or THEY get brought into the liability chain?
2) remove all safety devices from the speeders vehicle – seatbelts, airbags etc. then put a rusty spike on the steering wheel facing the driver. they need “skin in the game”
Heck, my 2023 Yamaha MT-10 actually came with a speed limiter here in the US. There’s no throttle override like I’ve seen in European rentals I’ve had. Usually there’s like a detent in the accelerator that once you get past it, it lets you exceed the limiter. It’s kinda fun on a motorcycle though, I can set it whatever speed and then go full throttle everywherej, very weird.
So THIS is why that car from several days ago had all those bumper stickers on it.
I’d say good, but the real solution is a permanent ban from driving for these “super speeders”. If you can’t drive responsibly, then you get to figure out other means to get around.
The highest speed limit in the country is 85mph – why are cars allowed to go much faster than that to start with? Especially in a country where the level of driver training generally starts at “nonexistent” and only goes down from there?
No they can drive but they need to be forced to drive a Mitsubishi Mirage.
A 1997 Mitsubishi Mirage.
I’d be curious what kind of monitoring and reporting there is, and if the devices are capable of contacting a server on a regular basis.
For instance, if it can do this and it reports no activity at all, that might trigger a check to see if the driver is using a cousin’s car or just taking the bus.
If it can report how many times it’s been activated, it might make sense to set a threshold for removing it that keeps the device in the car if the driver jams on the gas pedal too many times.
It might make sense to set up a probation period after the initial sentence is served and if the device reports more problem driving, it gets reactivated.
I came across the incident in Renton linked in the story just a few minutes after it had happened. I also regularly pass by the crosses erected by the family members and for several months after the crash could see the skid marks left by the van being pushed sideways and all of the paint marks from the investigation.
Actual enforcement could have gone a long way to prevent the deadly crash. In body cam footage of the kid’s first crash he admitted to the cop that he saw an open road and decided to open it up. The cop did not cite him for anything, just let him go stating “as long as you’ve learned your lesson”. It also could have been prevented if the parents had taken responsibility for the actions of their child and not given him a second car after he totaled the first one, or a 3rd one after he totaled the 2nd.
The sad thing about this is that residents had been complaining about the lack of enforcement and it took this crash to get authorities to do anything about it. Unfortunately instead of doing what the public asked, increased enforcement, they responded with lowering the speed limit on the road the van was traveling on, not on the road the kid was driving on and of course everyone still drives at their previous speed that they had before the speed limit change.
I’m of the opinion we have far to many laws designed to prevent ‘x’, but when people do ‘x’ anyway, we don’t wind up punishing them very much.
3 this applies to that quickly come to mind are traffic violations, gun violations, and drug violations.
I had a friend in high school who drove like a maniac, had multiple accidents due to driving too fast on back roads, yet never once got so much as a ticket out of any of the incidents. Always boggled my mind, especially because I’m one of those people where if I got caught doing one of those things I’d have gotten slapped with a ticket so fast it would make your head spin.
Wouldn’t a more effective deterrent be to auction their car for charity right in front of them? We’re already talking about people with multiple serious speed-related infractions, usually involving collisions. Pulling their license won’t stop them, but confiscating their vehicle for a worthy cause might.
This honestly seems really lenient.
I’d be curious if there’s a behavior modification angle to these, at least in some cases.
Nag devices can be effective at weeding out bad behavior, and if a speeder steps on the gas enough times without the effect they want, they may break the habit.
But I honestly don’t know – it’s possible that massive speeders are such extreme personality types that normal measures don’t work. I’d be interested in follow up research, and I’d hope there were ways to install longer term recording, similar to the way some commercial vehicles monitor driver speeds.
Pulling their license then a good stiff jail sentence for driving without a license will stop them. And I think jail/prison should be a place where you would rather gnaw your own arm off before going back, not a country club with bouncers to keep you in.
But confiscating not just THIER car, but ANY car they are found knowingly by the owner driving after a ban would certainly help. If they are driving someone else’s car without that person knowing, well, that’s grand theft auto, so no need to punish an innocent.
Workhouses are full of people caught driving without a license. If they keep getting caught toss them into a deeper cell.
Like I said, jail/prison should be a place you would rather gnaw your own arm off than go back to. Cruel and unusual punishment is having to deal with the aftermath of some asshole driving without a license and insurance hitting you.
The problem is they often aren’t caught driving without a license until they’ve hit someone or are pulled over for some other reason. My wife was rear-ended by a guy with a suspended license and no insurance. He was taken into custody after the accident, but only after bashing our car and injuring my family.
No insurance in my state equals suspended registration. And my county has LOTS of plate readers that do a great job of catching that. Driving is a privilege and needs to be treated as one.
In NC, they sell the cars of habitual DUI violators – and the drunk can’t ever buy their own car back.
You know, I’ve never really got these types of systems. Like, we’re saying that we don’t trust you to operate a fully functional car because your past bad behavior. If you’re at that point, why not just take the person’s license? Interloc never really stopped drunk driving, I don’t see how an inconvenience is going to amount to change. Sure, the person can get to work and what not. But if you’re inhibiting them, clearly you don’t trust them with the privilege. Just pull the privilege. It functions as a natural consequence. This whole driving is a privilege and being able to due 5 over on freeway as an extra privilege for being a good boy, seems just needless.
A suspended license isn’t going to stop them either. My wife was rear-ended by a guy with a revoked license and no insurance. He just got a ticket.
I think there are a couple things at play, the biggest of which is the complete lack of public transit in some areas. If we had good public transit available, pulling someone’s license would make a lot of sense.
As with a lot of issues, expanding public transit could help.
GPS speed limits can be inaccurate. A camera based system reading speed limit signs would be “in theory” better.
My camera based Traffic Sign recognition system keeps grabbing off-ramp speeds and displaying them.
They are accurate enough for habitual speeders.
Will this work in all Altimas?
Needs to be standard equipment in all Nissan products.
Just came up with a better idea.
Just issue them a court ordered Vespa scooter as their only vehicle.
You might be able to speed if you’re going downhill, but odds are if you cause a wreck, you are the only one who is going to be a spatter on the pavement. You might leave a pastel color streak on a SUV’s bumper, but other than that, it isn’t going to notice.
Got passengers? Court ordered Yugo. 0-60? Probably 🙂
Diesel Chevette
With a few sand bags for weight in the back.
The only issue I see, is that it’s based off GPS and data on the roads regarding their posted speeds.
However, I drive around Washington enough to know, that most GPS systems will miss speed changes usually by a couple hundred yards or more. Like back highway roads that are 55 MPH, then suddenly drop to 35MPH due to passing through a blink-and-miss-it town. Usually, the GPS doesn’t update the speed correctly at correct spots.
Also, in that example, what does system do? If they are going 55 and the speed suddenly changes to 35 or lower, does the system just completely cut the throttle until the car slows to the lower posted speed? If so, that still requires the occupant to manually brake, and they may simply choose not to.
But a Camera based system sometimes misses signs for what ever reason, like for example a truck in the right lane while you are in the left lane. On my car and google maps it is usually pretty close to the actual location of the sign. On our car that has both GPS and sign recognition they often change at very close to the same time but the sign recognition will sometimes miss a sign with a speed change and be displaying the previous higher or lower speed limit until it finds the next sign that it can read. So yeah neither system is perfect.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I like the idea, but I’m not thrilled with the limitations. Sometimes you need to speed up to get out of the way of danger (surprises when passing, etc) and what’s to prevent the offender from driving someone else’s car? The driver has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the law, so disregarding the threat of a suspended license seems like an obvious eventuality for at least some of these offenders.
I’d be more inclined to go with a GPS ankle bracelet and a system to track its motion. If it moves faster than the posted speed limit, the vehicle would be subject to being pulled over to confirm the offender isn’t driving. If the offender is driving (and couldn’t explain the speeding violation), he/she goes off to jail and the car is impounded, and possibly subject to forfeiture.
Your idea wouldn’t work. It would infringe on the constition and what-not. Reasonable suspicion and all that jazz.
People on parole are subject to searches whenever the police decide they want to bother. I had a buddy that was a parole agent, and he’d tell me stories about keeping the parolees occupied while other agents searched their vehicles. No warrant necessary – you sign up for that as a condition of parole.
Mine came factory installed in 1986. It’s called “140hp diesel in a 4000lb car”. I mean, it CAN speed. But you reaaaally gotta earn it.
My 300 SDL could do over 120 mph, stock.
According to the previous owner, with the 560SEL rear gear I have, it’ll top out at 150ish…eventually, on a long enough strip of road in Mexico.
The taller gear is GREAT for highway economy, but makes around town more sluggish. Traffic is usually a “foot to the floor” affair on acceleration, ESPECIALLY if the A/C is on. If I use the entire on ramp, I can be at 60mph when it’s time to merge.
Maybe downhill. Or with aeromods.
140 horsepower in a car with that much drag might do 130-ish with that gearing.
I haven’t taken it north of 90, myself. But it happily cruises at 75 all day. It just takes me minutes to get there.
Well I had 64 HP in a 2300 lbs car back in the day and while it accelerated slowly, it was not hard to double the speed limit in a city (it’s a threshold to license suspension where I live and it was decades ago, before cameras were on every next pole). Nowadays I find the manual speed limiter a handy tool to drive responsibly with ease avoid those camera tickets.
Jokes on you, my daily is long before obd and a manual, an electronic based limiter is not going to do anything. That being said, I’m not much of a speeder, so they probably don’t have to worry about me. Got to get all the MPG’s I can since the car is old.
I’m pretty sure if a judge ruled that you need to install one of these in your car and it wasn’t physically possible, they’d see that as “your problem” not “joke’s on them”.
I would think they’d just impound your car and/or revoke your license entirely in the instance that this device can’t be installed on the car.
while I like the idea of this, it may cause bad habits for people who already drive poorly. since it cuts the throttle at the speed limit, you can basically drive around with your foot on the floor the entire time.
I wonder if the device monitors how often the user is trying to accelerate after the speed limit is hit. how about adding an annoying 80’s voice sound for “your door is ajar”. “Ding! You are at the Speed Limit!”, “Ding! You are at the Speed Limit!” that will get them to stop!
interesting, I wonder how these a locked into the ODBC port? cause you can pull it out pretty easy if not.
And an ankle monitor is physically easy to remove, but you wouldn’t want to try it.
When I first heard about this, the only thing that really seemed off was the limited time with the device. 4-5 months of it seems short. I don’t think people need to be stuck with it forever, but I would have expected a year. I guess they’ll be able to amend the law if they start seeing people reoffend after the device is removed.
Yeah, 4-5 months and it doesn’t go into effect for another 4 years. Who are they trying not to piss off?
Yeah, the 4 year warning is especially odd when they are showing off how well the device works. Usually that length means they need to give some time to make sure things work. There’s some strange things afoot. Makes me think some of the votes were predicated on it taking effect after folks left office or something.
I think these are a great idea. My only concern is that the speed limit matching is probably not accurate enough. While it’s gotten better over the years, Android Auto is still frequently wrong about the speed limit in some areas. If these rely on the same data it could be a real hassle to deal with.
I don’t mind someone dealing with that hassle for 4 months after excessive speeding violations. I do wonder about the other side of it. If they’re going as fast as it allows when it thinks the speed limit is much higher than it is, there may be some stretches that become really popular with reckless drivers.
I agree with you that it would probably do much more good than harm. I’m less worried about these criminals than I am about the technology being rolled out on all new cars.
It already exists on new cars. The device here allows control by law enforcement. For instance, anyone in a Tesla could be driven off a cliff any time Musk gets an urge.
Sure, if they roll this out to all new cars there could be some headaches. But I really don’t mind having excessive speeders and reckless drivers as the ones ironing out those kinks.
I had they same concern. I would hope that the amount of time of the inaccuracy would not give these A$$holes enough time to kill or injure someone else. If they think the inaccurate data is a hassle they should not have been speeding so much as to need the device.
Work zones, in particular, are often not accounted for – particularly an issue for someone who probably chronically speeds through them.
I do find a few areas where google maps consistently gets confused as to whether I’m on the freeway with a 70 mph limit or if I’m no the road that runs parallel to the freeway with a 35mph limit as it will frequently tell me I need to take the next entrance to the freeway when I’m already on the freeway. Can’t say I’ve driven the side roads where that happens but it certainly is possible for it to get it wrong the other direction and think the limit is 70mph when you are actually on the road with the 35mph limit.
It shocks me how bad Google Maps is at knowing speed limits because my ancient Garmin is right about 99.5% of the time. And unlike the rare instances where Garmin is wrong, it’s not just out-of-date map data because on some local roads Google will display a limit that I know for a fact was never correct for that stretch of road.
I’m sure a company that specializes in speed monitoring systems for fleet vehicles will perform better than android auto
With the sparse traffic enforcement, Imagine the shear number of time one would have to speed and the rate of speed to get caught enough to be considered this much of a risk. Wow.
Also I am not a fan of those overconfident a$$es who believe “I should be able to speed as much as I want it is my right to endanger they lives of those around me”
Better idea: just make them drive Kei cars.
FULL. CIRCLE. From a ban to a mandate.
A bandate.
Sounds like a temporary solution.
Good.
Now roll this out countywide.