California Drivers May Soon Get Mandatory In-Car Speed Warnings Like the EU

Exceed the speed limit in one of the 27 European Union countries, and you may get some pushback from your vehicle. As of July, new cars sold in the EU must include a speed- warning device that alerts drivers if they exceed the posted limit. At a minimum, vehicles must include acoustic or haptic speed warnings, though the European Commission gives automakers the latitude to supplant those passive measures with either an active accelerator pedal that applies counterpressure against the driver’s foot or a governor that restricts the vehicle’s speed to the legal limit. Drivers can override or deactivate these admonishments, but the devices must default to their active state at startup.

Now California is looking to emulate the EU with legislation that would mandate in-car speed-warning devices. The bill, SB 961, aims to make such systems standard in the Golden State by requiring just about every 2030 model-year vehicle equipped with either GPS or a front-facing camera to also have visual and audio warnings when driving more than 10 mph over the speed limit. Provisions within the bill would ensure that drivers can fully disable the systems.

Those championing the technology argue that it could save lives—consider that in 2022, 18 percent of the passenger-vehicle drivers, or 8236 people, involved in fatal crashes in the U.S. were speeding, according to NHTSA. Yet even safety advocates struggle to believe that the regulations as written can do much good. Graziella Jost, who serves as projects director at the European Transport Safety Council and managed a campaign that helped lead the charge for speed-warning technology, finds the EU’s—and, by extension, the California bill’s—minimum requirements for the systems to be lacking.

Jost notes that the European Transport Safety Council’s own testing indicates that drivers generally find an audible warning irritating, making it likely they will shut off such systems. Then there’s the problem of using camera-based sign-recognition technology to suss out speed limits. Jost points out the middling reliability of such a setup given that its capabilities are conditional on physical speed-limit signs—postings that can pop up irregularly or be obscured by traffic or the surrounding environment. The systems are also prone to misinterpreting more complex speed-limit signs, such as those in school zones that apply only during certain hours of the day or conditional speed signage that varies for differing vehicle types.

Ultimately, what the EU has implemented, and California’s bill advocates for, stands to annoy drivers more than deter them from speeding.