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All new vehicles sold in Europe – including Northern Ireland but not Great Britain – will be required from now on to have intelligent speed assistance technology installed.

From 7 July 2024, every vehicle sold in the EU and Northern Ireland will need to be fitted with a range of technical safety features as standard. The most notable of these is the Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) or speed limiter.

Those vehicles already registered or in circulation are exempt, but any existing unregistered cars on forecourts will have to be retrofitted with a speed limiter before they can be sold.

This ISA mandate comes after the European Commission’s legislation that made it a legal requirement for all new vehicles sold in Europe to be fitted with a speed limiter from 6 July 2022.

The difference is that while drivers of most new cars with this feature were able to override it and simply turn it off, it is now impossible to permanently turn it off as it restarts each time the engine does.

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  • The Germans love to drive on their Autobahn, which in certain sections has no speed limits. In fact I have been driven on the Autobahn at 175 mph.

    So I guess they will not buy French cars.

    The problem with reading the speed using information from the signs, is when they are covered with mud or snow.

    There are some places here in the US where there are two speed limits printed on one sign - A high limit for daytime driving and a lower one for night time driving.

    I don't know if such signs exist in Europe.

    As a final comment  I suggest you view the following youtube song video "Beep Beep -The little Nash Rambler" from 1958.

    Peter Brooks

    Palm Bay FL

  • in reply to Peter Brooks

    Ah, we have:

    • signs covered by bushes
    • signs set at the wrong angle
    • two set of signs side by side for off ramps
    • signs that are missing and the local authorities haven't bothered to replace it yet (which makes it interesting, because you should apply national speed limits at that point)
    • signs with graffiti

    Probably more use cases that others can put together :)

    If you use GPS and data to work out the road speed (which is what google maps does), you have inaccuracies in the stored data, new roads that are missing and the general inaccuracy of the GPS itself.

    I notice that some OEMs are putting a switch on the dashboard that you can press to disable the feature. If some markets don't have it, there will likely be a method to turn off the feature in the software. No OEM writes market specific software, its all handled by configuration options.

    Although UK is excluded, I believe our vehicles will have it turned on by default also.

  • in reply to Mark Tickner

    What about reading MPH and KmH?.

    Regarding graffiti, here in the US I have seen signs changed from 30 to 80 by just one pen stroke!

    Peter Brooks

    Palm Bay 

  • in reply to Peter Brooks

    "What about reading MPH and KmH?."

    Depends on the type of instrument cluster. There is also MPH & km/h, KM/H only, MPH only and KM/H & mph as I recall. There are also options for where the red line goes based on engine.

    The modern style would be that the entire cluster is digital, so its just a case of having the different market graphics and selecting the correct one based on configuration.

    Old style would be to use an stepper motor gauge. You would simply have printed the various gauge backgrounds and physically build the cluster with the appropriate one inserted for the market it is going to.

    Even older style would be an analogue gauge - but I've not seen one of those since the early 2000's. But fundamentally its the same method of building with the right physical graphics.

    Most Tier 1's have a small number of assembly factories scattered world wide to serve the needs of their OEM customers. Automotive is definitively a globalised industry. As an example, a modern instrument cluster will likely support 10-15 languages (and the related character sets) on its displays, but normally you can only see a small number due to configuration.

    You may ask, why have all of this extra data that you are not going to use. But thanks to mobile phones, memory is relatively cheap. Its essentially a software development trade off - less software variants to validate versus the extra complexity in the testing of a single variant.

    Fairly obviously, I'm not going to get into specifics on a relatively public forum.

  • in reply to Mark Tickner

    Hello Mark:

    I was really talking about the recognition of the actual printed speed limit by a camera and associated software. For example when one travels from the US (MPH) over the border into Canada (Km/h) both the signs have the same shape and look the same.

    It might be the same going from the UK to say France.

    Peter Brooks 

    Palm Bay   

Comment
  • in reply to Mark Tickner

    Hello Mark:

    I was really talking about the recognition of the actual printed speed limit by a camera and associated software. For example when one travels from the US (MPH) over the border into Canada (Km/h) both the signs have the same shape and look the same.

    It might be the same going from the UK to say France.

    Peter Brooks 

    Palm Bay   

Children
  • in reply to Peter Brooks

    I would guess that they would use some form of geofencing software to determine the location of the car. If you look at the UK and France, the distance between then is sufficient that even with degraded GPS accuracy, it should be possible to identify the company that the vehicle is located in. I would imagine they have different detection and recognition algorithms per country.

    But some countries have close borders, As well as the USA and Canada, you could consider Northern Ireland and Ireland. Again the signs are very similar between the two countries. I would expect that a lot of testing has been done.

    There are also countries where there is a left-to-right switch as you cross over the border.

  • in reply to Mark Tickner

    You are also assuming that there will be a non jammed non-spoofed GNSS/GPs signal in your area. That may well not always be true!

  • in reply to mapj1

    Very true, however commercial manufacturers are not likely to have access to systems/technologies that prevent jamming and spoofing.

    If you consider drones, the larger drones need to be geofenced (by regulation) to prevent them flying over things they shouldn't. A drone would have the same issue with jamming/spoofing.

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