- More than 60 percent of drivers wouldn’t object to audible anti-speeding tech on new cars, an IIHS survey says.
- Half of those polled said they would be okay with devices that made it physically more difficult or impossible to drive beyond the limit.
- Speed is currently considered a factor in a quarter of traffic fatalities, according to the IIHS.
Anti-speeding tech becomes compulsory from next month on every new car sold in Europe, and it seems American drivers are open to the same systems being adopted in the US. A study by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS) found that more than 60 percent of American drivers would be okay with having anti-speeding devices on their car.
Drivers in that 60 percent group were asked if they’d object to their car giving them an audio-visual warning when they exceeded the speed limit, but almost as many were amenable to far more invasive versions of the go-slow Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) technology.
Related: IIHS Pushes For Mandatory Speed Limiting Tech To End ‘Epidemic Of Aggressive Driving’
Around half of the drivers polled by the IIHS said they wouldn’t mind if their next new car came with a device that makes the accelerator pedal harder to press or automatically restricts speed.
One reason for that could be that those people were already thinking about the potential for lower insurance premiums. When asked specifically if they’d welcome ISA on their new car if it guaranteed lower premiums, 70 percent said they would, with 80 percent of those who preferred audio-visual-only warnings to anything more draconian rolling out the red carpet for ISA if it came with a 10 mph (16 km/h) tolerance.
In total, the IIHS, which wants to make speed-assist features mandatory in the US, spoke to 1,802 drivers, dividing them into three groups for the study. One group was asked about ISA that only provides an advisory warning about excess speed, another about ISA that makes the accelerator more difficult to press, and a third about ISA that restricts acceleration when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit.
ISA works either by reading road signs or via GPS mapping data, and though the systems now fitted to European cars can be switched off, they reactivate when the car is restarted.
Almost 60 percent of drivers asked about advisory-only ISA systems said they would find it acceptable if the tech came on at the start of every journey, compared with only 51 percent of those in the stiffer pedal group and 48 percent in the group assigned to full-on speed-limiting tech.
How would you have reacted if polled about ISA systems? Leave a comment below and let us know.
