California’s Proposed Speed Limit Warning System Law Has One Big Problem

Man Driving A Car On Road
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California state senate has voted for new legislation that, if passed, would force every new car sold in California starting in 2032 to beep at drivers and display a warning graphic should they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph. While not a speed limiter, this nanny wouldn’t be able to be turned off, and contravening this legislation would violate the criminal code, should it pass. Needless to say, this is a big deal, and if you read into the actual Senate bill, you might find one major potential problem.

It’s worth noting that California’s goal isn’t without precedent. The European Union has mandated intelligent speed assistance, although it permits active systems that push back against drivers by modulating accelerator pedal control, along with systems that can be turned off. California, on the other hand, only wants to mandate a passive system that gives just visual and auditory alerts, but the alerts can’t be disabled.

It’s easy to see a potential common-sense legal issue with the wording of SB-961, and it has to do with the fundamentals of connected cars. The bill refers to the proposed form of passive intelligent speed assistance as “an integrated vehicle system that uses, at minimum, the GPS location of the vehicle compared with a database of posted speed limits.” This would require all new cars from 2032 onward to have access to updated reference data, but what happens when a car’s internet connectivity is killed off due to network sunsetting like we saw with 3G? While the bill is written to provide leniency towards database inconsistencies, what if a car can’t access the database altogether?

California Freeway

Under the proposed legislation, manufacturers would only be able to disable passive speed assistance on any vehicle “sold as an authorized emergency vehicle,” so this may be a backdoor for continued connected services support after the eventual 4G sunset. However, that fails to take into account what might happen if an automaker goes bust. Not every EV startup will survive, and if that data connection is severed, what legal area does that fall under?

The concept of a simple speed limit warning is a good idea, but the proposed implementation of SB-961 seems like well-intentioned legislation lacking in execution. There are a few potential pitfalls that the bill doesn’t seem to take into account, but fortunately, it still needs to make it through the House of Representatives in order to become law.

I have a few ideas on how to fix it.

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Firstly, data from camera-based traffic-sign-recognition systems that are built into the car and don’t require any data connection should be the first suggested method for manufacturers to enable vehicles to “know” the speed limit of the road being traveled on. Admittedly, such systems aren’t perfect, but they are future-proofed against network sunsetting. Secondly, allow the passive intelligent speed assistance system to be disabled, but force it to be on by default every time the ignition is cycled. That ought to reduce pushback while still ensuring that the vast majority of systems remain in use.

There are some decent conceptual fundamentals here and it just needs a little tuning up, but what else would you expect when bureaucrats are in charge? Oh, and it’s worth noting that even if this legislation passes, it won’t curb speeding overnight. The average age of a car on U.S. roads is 14 years old, so regardless of how things shake out, there will be plenty of cars on California roads without audible speed limit warnings for years to come.

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213 thoughts on “California’s Proposed Speed Limit Warning System Law Has One Big Problem”

  1. This morning, while driving on the 101 on my way to work, toodling along at with traffic at 80mph(speed limit is 65mph) I was aggressively passed on the right by a CHP truck, who went on to weave through people ahead of me.

    The de facto speed limit for most California roads is 80mph. This legislation doesn’t make any sense.

    1. It makes sense in only two ways I can see: 1) Like most other laws, it’s to cumulatively make owning and driving a car as inconvenient as possible in California. 2) It’s a circus act; the politician gets to claim they passed x number of laws to make the state safer so you should vote them into the next office they want to hold.

    2. Most mornings when I drive a few miles on the 101, I’m lucky to get up to 65mph in the HOV lane due to congestion near where 85 merges into 101.

      Maybe, just for fun, they should put speed warnings on motorcycles too! Just imagine the fun of a 120dB loudspeaker screaming the speed limit at you while lanesplitting your way to and from work!

  2. If California really wanted to save lives and increase safety, they’d mandate systems disabling all non-voice command functions of paired cellphones while the vehicle is operating.

    This would be rife with opportunities for ad campaigns like, “Eyes up here, please!”

    1. “This would be rife with opportunities for ad campaigns like, “Eyes up here, please!”

      Sure as long as that ad goes with a HUD projecting a rockin’ set of hooters on the windshield.

  3. Right to repair.

    TBH, for something stupid like a cellular module/wwan, they’re incredibly easy to replace, they’re cheap, and they follow a pre-existing standards depending on form factor.

    USB, m.2, pcie, take your pick. It’s just however many SMT connections for the antennas, and the card itself also snaps into place.

    In quantity, they’re usually <$20 to replace. The profits are going somewhere, if they’re doing regulation, they just say that they dictate the technology/form factor/and price to be used and then that’d be it.

    It’s an easy riddle to solve, but legislators aren’t exactly smart people when it comes to technology.

  5. Brazil figured this out in the residential areas with remarkably low tech – just put in enormous speed bumps so often that it’s near impossible to reach the speed limit between them. Having 1.0L cars to drive also helps.

    That said, the rather underpowered Fiat Moby I rented the last time I was there had one of these speed-beepers installed. Every time I crested the blistering pace of 100km/hr, an un-labeled light on the dash went off accompanied by an annoying “beep”. Since I didn’t know what was going on at first, I thought the car was having some sort of issue and it just added to the overall stress of the first day out driving there. It would only beep once each time, but driving in traffic in areas with a 100 km/hr limit was incredibly annoying simply because the ebb and flow of traffic would naturally rise and fall above the limit quite a bit.

    2. My city has an even more cost-effective solution to get the same results: Just don’t maintain the road very well. It’s free AND everyone drives slowly!

    3. Your post just reminded me, my work sent me to Brazil this April, and in Sao Paulo they had the gigantic speed bumps, on some of the worst maintained city roads I’ve ever been on; full of potholes, or patchy “repairs” that were worse than the potholes.

      When I asked the locals about this state of affairs, I was told the answer was corruption, as the city will pay more for crappy repairs that fix nothing, compared to resurfacing the streets wholesale, plus the “repairs” have to be more frequent, so the local politician-connected road construction & repair businesses have a non-stop windfall of public money, part of which goes back to the city administrators as kickbacks.

  6. Moses brought speed limits along with 10 Commandments down from Mt Shasta, so they must be from Heaven, never to be broken nor changed. Speed limit violations seem to be the only enforceable traffic code violation, yet is probably only one factor of many causes of traffic crashes. Is this issue worth the attention?

  7. The first corollary, if this passes, is for all speed limits to be set by engineers using established 85th-percentile standards, and not by some politician responding to a squeaky-wheel constituent complaining that “the cars are going too fast” and/or searching for a new revenue source.

    2. In my hometown there’s an intersection which had the squeaky wheel problem – there’s an arbitrary stop sign that doesn’t correspond with the flow of traffic because there was a woman at that intersection who loudly complained that them darn kids with their loud music were driving too fast by her house.

      Annoyed by the poor planning and incensed by her insult to our honor, the kids of the local high school resolved that the only proper way to leave that intersection was with force. You can get a surprisingly long burnout with an ’80s Civic!

      We were dumb but our spite game was on point.

      1. You were dumb.

        The appropriate spite would have been to stop as long as possible while playing your music as loud as possible. Preferably in a long chain of cars all playing music looping around the block.

        1. Nah that would have just inconvenienced us – and it was really speed that got her going.

          Burnouts only increased when she called the cops on a friend because he drove a Mustang.

  8. Would it just beep once after exceeding 10mph or the beep endlessly the whole time your 10+. How badly this can go. If I ever am forced to move to CA all my cars will be on a MT trust.

  9. I have long held that the best cure for speeding isn’t technology based. Speeders should just be sentenced to having to drive a 1986 Dodge Aries for a month in order to really feel how horrifying 80 miles per hour can be.

      1. I hit maybe 82-83 mph in my dad’s fuel-injected ’87 Dodge Aries K-car trying to keep up with a friend in a ’74 Mercury Cougar. Sid is correct, it was terrifying.

  12. Well, my previous deadline to buy a new car was 2034 (the last year before they ban new gas powered cars), they just moved it up to 2031 for me.

    Unpopular take here: This is why lobbyists have a purpose. Your average legislator has a very poor understanding of specialized industries, or really much of anything they’re voting on. People complain about lobbyists writing legislation, but they at least tend to have some knowledge of the subject, and are at least advocating for SOMEBODY’s interests. If the congress-critters actually wrote the laws, they wouldn’t even know how to define many things.

    I feel like the automakers have little influence in CA compared to the federal level. There’s only one car factory here. CA long ago decided that the auto companies are the enemy; unfortunately too few people know that our lack of public transportation is a direct result of hatred for the Southern Pacific Railroad a century ago. The SP admittedly had too much power here, but it also controlled the Pacific Electric Railway, and the state did less than zero to try to keep that around, at least a bit out of spite.

    1. I totally agree with your second paragraph. It’s not lobbyists (industry experts) writing laws that cause the problems. It’s the fact that they are allowed to bribe politicians to accept the laws as written.

  13. Typical for California politicians. They seem to believe that all crime is down to either people being too dumb to know they’re breaking a law, or doing it because their life depends on it.

    Also how exactly will they be enforcing people not disabling the system, will every speeding ticket now come with a mandatory inspection to make sure the system still works? It wouldn’t surprise me given how they already issue exhaust noise tickets without actually measuring the sound level, the victim defendant has to pay to have the car tested, and they don’t get that cost refunded when the exhaust is proven to be completely legal.

  14. Well at least I wouldn’t hear a warning on my residential side street, which Google maps is convinced has a limit of 80 km/h.

    The general problem with everything like this is that technology doesn’t work as well or as comprehensively as legislators think it does.

    1. Exactly. They are making a big assumption, namely that the tech actually works 100% of the time. It doesn’t. I have the speed sign reading cameras in a few cars, and they sometimes read the sign wrong, or read the wrong sign (when you are on the highway at 70, with the adaptive cruise on, and it reads the 25 sign from the exit or the weigh station lane, you need to get on the gas fast to override the immediate slow down). As for the “database” idea – first, it assumes the GPS works. Second, it assumes the database is right. I have several cars, and in one stretch some of the cars think it’s 40 MPH (as does Apple Maps) and the others think it’s 55. There no sign at all, so in Michigan it should be 55 (unless the township just “forgot” to put up a sign).

      This legislation is a BS way to solve the problem of speeding. There will be easy ways to at least disable the sound if not all of it that will be reversible before getting the car inspected. So this is a waste of time and money, just for some virtue signaling.

    2. My GPS-enabled dashcam always yells at me for speeding on one particular stretch of freeway. Because of GPS drift, it thinks I’m going 70 on the surface street directly adjacent to the freeway in that area.

  15. As I like to roam unfamiliar backroads, I bought a fancy gps in which I can set a notice for going a certain amount over the limit. It also chimes a warning when I’m approaching a reduced speed zone which has saved me several times. I would not want such a permanent system built in to a car, though—especially if I couldn’t disable it.

  16. there will be plenty of cars on California roads without audible speed limit warnings for years to come.

    not to mention all those cars from out of state that aren’t equipped with one, or that were disabled outside of California’s jurisdiction.

  17. Firstly, make the first suggested method of implementation pulling speed limit data from vision-based traffic sign recognition systems that are built into the car

    Just need a friend to temporarily stand next to the road and hold a “150 MPH” sign as you drive past, or print a tiny one and paste it over the camera at the appropriate position.

    Seriously though, speed signs are sometimes missing (or around here, shot at) and I’ve wondered if it wouldn’t be better to just paint some pattern on the shoulder stripe that denotes the speed. 30mph could be black/white zebra but 55mph is checkerboard and 65 is green/white chevrons or some such. The camera could continuously monitor this stripe and you would know what speed zone you’re in.

      1. Someone will just reprogram them.

        Besides – We can’t even maintain our existing roads as a nation, now all of a sudden we’re going to embed RFID throughout. Color me unconvinced.

  18. The speed warnings could be issued by a system operated by the state government. Weather warnings, amber alerts and other notifications are sent by government agencies rather than private entities. A standard receiver could also be mandated that does not vary across car manufacturers. That would enable the system to function in cars even if the manufacturer went bankrupt at some point.

    1. As a government employee, I can tell you that having the government incharge will guarantee nothing, and possibly open the door to abuse.

      1. Enough data could be sent from a network of transmitters to provide the speed limits for the area around each site and the receivers could use GPS to determine where they are and if the vehicle/driver is following the speed limit.

  19. I actually have a car that has speed chimes, I can turn them off or adjust the speed setting they go off at. They aren’t tied to speed limits though just a set speed and gives a gentle chime every time you pass through the set speed. I keep them on because that car makes it too easy to do send me to jail speeds without even realizing it otherwise.

    1. My namesake vehicle has a similar system. I leave it on because I often drive it in areas unfamiliar to me where I’m navigating rather than paying attention to speed limits, which in some small towns seem intended to generate revenue from the unwary.

      I’m a little confused. Is the outrage here focused on:

      A speed warning in generalA state mandating a speed warningCalifornia mandating a speed warning

  20. So will this turn into Chicago’s speeding ticket cameras that send tickets in the mail? So this will be used to notice you are speeding and then just mail you tickets like the speeding cameras do

  21. I swear California just throws darts at a board with an array of ‘problems’ and then finds the most intrusive or obscure way of writing laws around them.

  23. While removing it might be a criminal violation (as proposed) how in the world would that be enforced? Have a cop take the allegedly modified car up over the speed limit on purpose? Make a driver show it works by speeding? That also seems foolish at best.

    Not to mention it will be a programmed in system, no matter how hard automakers and legislators try, the aftermarket ALAWYS finds a way to break computer nannies. Nearly every “uncrackable” ECU has been able to be tuned, and I would wager companies spend more effort on locking down than a mandated buzzer only required in a percentage of a single market.

    1. California already has vehicle inspections every two years that do a pretty good job of catching people messing with the emissions system, they can do a similar check during these inspections to make sure any “safety” system has not been modified.

      1. Yeah, CA nerfed programming your ECU several years back and they can catch it just plugging into your OBD2 port. In fact, on most vehicles made in the last 15 years, the “smog check” is really just an ECU check and visual inspection, they don’t actually check tailpipe emissions except on stuff from the 20th century.

        However, they do not do vehicle inspections aside from emissions. I get why the smog laws are like they are here, but why they dont do any safety inspections is beyond me. God forbid you replace your stolen catalytic converter with one that is no different but isn’t on the “approved” list; but CA is just fine with your shitbox running around with the cords showing on the tires and the brake pads literally down to the backing plates. Poorly-maintained cars are more of a menace than people going 80mph in 65 zone on a freeway.

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