The freedom of the open road is ingrained in American car culture, but our habitual speeding costs thousands of lives a year. Now, road safety advocates are calling for a fairly simple fix: onboard technology that can warn lead-footed drivers to slow down.
By Ian Duncan
“We have this technology that we know causes people to slow down and we know saves lives, so let’s use it,” he said.
Police patrols and ad campaigns to get people to change their habits have had limited impact on the number of road deaths in recent years. In 2023, speeding was a factor in 11,600 crash deaths, according to the latest federal data, a figure that has been largely unchanged for a decade.
The anti-speeding systems in the California bill would give drivers an audible and visual warning once they are more than 10 mph over the limit. Other versions of the technology make the gas pedal push back once the speed limit has been exceeded.
Auto industry and driver groups are mounting a campaign urging Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to veto the measure ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for his signature. A spokesman for Newsom said the measure would be “evaluated on its merits.”
Road safety advocates say the new technology, along with similar systems that would block people from driving drunk and help them avoid risky lane changes, could prevent thousands of deaths annually. But for drivers accustomed to broad freedom to hit the road pretty much however they like, the technologies would represent a stark new reality: Cars that say no.
Opponents of the California bill cast the idea as more than faintly ridiculous.
“We’re going to have a government-approved mechanism on our cars to make sure that we don’t go any faster?” James Gallagher, the Republican leader in the State Assembly, the legislature’s lower house, said during the final floor debate. “That’s the definition of a nanny state.”
But the road safety advocates backing the measure — many of whom have lost family members in crashes involving speeding drivers — say requiring the technology could save more families from the kind of suffering they have endured.
“We know that speed kills over and over again,” said Joe Martinez, a Fresno activist whose son Paul was killed in 2013.
A key question for regulators is whether the public will accept the systems, something researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are still pondering. The federal agency includes the technology on a list of approaches that “work” to reduce risk, but declined to comment on the California bill. NHTSA said in a statement that it was starting research on the systems’ capabilities and acceptability to the public.
When the California bill was introduced, derision quickly filled online sites popular with car enthusiasts.
“When you think CA can’t get any worse,” one Reddit user wrote. Another said that where they live, traffic consistently moves 10-15 mph over the speed limit and that “this is going to do nothing but annoy people.”
A group representing the manufacturers of car modification products urged drivers to weigh in: “This intrusive legislation threatens your driving experience and personal freedom.”
Even Wiener, its sponsor, whose district includes San Francisco, quickly realized an initial proposal to require a system that can actively block drivers from speeding was a non-starter.
“There were people who said to me, if I want to risk getting a ticket, that’s my decision,” Wiener said. “I would respond and say it shouldn’t be your decision whether you put someone else’s life at risk.”
Lawmakers elsewhere are pursuing the systems as a way to tackle the most dangerous drivers. This year, the D.C. Council adopted a bill to require people convicted of serious speeding offenses to have speed-limiting systems installed on their vehicles. Similar legislation has been introduced in New York.
The history of auto safety measures also shows why the issue could be politically treacherous. In its early years, NHTSA suffered a major setback when it required that cars not move if they detected that occupants weren’t wearing seat belts. The technology didn’t work well and the rule caused an uproar. In 1974, Congress stepped in to overturn it.
“There’s that worry that if you go too far and you get pushed back ... it may take you a lot longer to make progress again,” said Jeffrey Michael, a former NHTSA official. “‘Be very careful’ was the lesson learned there.”
Around the same time, the federal government imposed a 55-mph national speed limit as a fuel-saving measure in response to an energy crisis. The year it went into force, crash deaths declined sharply. But states chafed at the rule, and in 1995, Congress repealed the limit over the objection of safety groups.
The nation’s wide roads and powerful vehicles invite high speeds, and opponents of the California bill argued that hardly anyone follows speed limits all the time.
“Look, I don’t want to get anyone convicted here, but y’all drive over 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, I guarantee it,” Assembly member Joe Patterson (R) said on the floor. “You’re all going to get beeped all the time.”
Nonetheless, studies suggest that the technology would be effective if widely deployed. A European rule requiring it on all new vehicles came into force in July, and regulators there predict it will cut traffic deaths by a fifth. The rules were phased in gradually, with automakers given options on how to comply, and the rollout has been largely free of controversy.
It is unusual for an individual state to regulate the safety of vehicles, a job typically left to NHTSA. Some lawmakers who backed the bill said they were frustrated by the slow pace of federal action. But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry group, said it would be wrong for one state to require the technology while federal regulators are still weighing its potential benefits. The organization is urging Newsom to veto the bill.
“We can’t have 50 states setting 50 competing sets of vehicle technology and safety rules,” the organization said in a statement.
In 2021, Congress directed NHTSA to set rules requiring technology such as an alcohol breath sensor to stop people from driving drunk. NHTSA is in the early stages of that work. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a safety advocacy group, estimates the systems would eventually prevent almost 10,000 deaths a year.
The problems of using technology to tackle speed and drunken driving pose almost opposite challenges, said Richard Blomberg, an engineer who has conducted research for NHTSA. The public sees drunken driving as broadly unacceptable, but Blomberg said designing a system to stop it is tricky. Speed, on the other hand, is easy to measure, yet drivers are likely to be more resistant to it being curbed, he said.
Some lawmakers have tried to overturn the drunken driving mandate, labeling it a “kill switch.” But Michael, the former NHTSA official, said that the agency can avoid the pitfalls of 50 years ago and that the modern technology would be reliable. And in his view, a handful of drivers incorrectly blocked from starting their cars would be worth the lives saved.
“There’s always anxiety about introducing new technology in cars,” he said. “You have to look at the benefits and the costs.”
