"Do you know how fast you were going back there?" is a phrase that's too common for some drivers.
Although speeding is a common moving violation, the purpose of its enforcement is to prevent accidents, injuries and fatalities, but new technology might be able to play the highway patrol role soon.
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In a recent announcement, the National Transportation Safety Board is asking automakers to install anti-speeding technology in all new cars to reduce the number of deaths in accidents where excessive speed was a factor.
The board issued a recommendation to 17 automakers that ask them to install some sort of speed assistance technology that will alert the driver of exceeding speed limits at the very least.
Officials recommended the use of intelligent speed assistance (ISA), which uses a car's GPS location compared with a database of posted speed limits and its onboard cameras to maintain speeds at the limit.
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The technology comes in two different iterations: active intelligent speed assistance and passive intelligent speed assistance.
In passive systems, drivers who exceed a posted speed limit will be warned of their speed through visual, sound or haptic alerts that will only go off if they comply.
Active systems, however, take a more physical approach. Here, equipped cars can use "mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit," or might use electronic speed limiters that would prevent the car from going above a posted limit.
The NTSB also recommended other changes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), including educating the public about ISA's benefits, an update to state highway safety program guidelines to include identification and tracking of repeat speeding offenders, repeat speeding countermeasures, research into individual state guidelines for ISA interlock programs for repeat speeding violators, as well as incentivizing automakers for adopting ISA technologies.
This set of recommendations come after the NTSB investigated a horrific crash in Las Vegas that resulted in nine deaths in January 2022. The board concluded that the crash was caused by excessive speeding, drug-impaired driving, as well as the state of Nevada’s failure to hold the driver accountable despite numerous speeding citations.
In this case, a 2018 Dodge Challenger ran a red light at 103 mph, causing a crash with five other cars, including a Toyota Sienna with seven occupants. The driver and passenger in the muscle car, as well as all seven occupants in the minivan died in the crash.
The NTSB found the driver of the Dodge was under the influence of cocaine and PCP and had a history of multiple speeding offenses.
“This crash is the latest in a long line of tragedies we’ve investigated where speeding and impairment led to catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said. “We know the key to saving lives is redundancy, which can protect all of us from human error that occurs on our roads. What we lack is the collective will to act on NTSB safety recommendations.”
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According to the NTSB, speeding-related crashes resulted in 12,330 deaths in 2021, about one-third of traffic fatalities that occurred that year.
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