Future Ford's May Detect Speeding and Report You to the Cops

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1143913_future-fords-might-detect-speeding-and-report-you-to-the-cops

by rmason • 2 years ago

27 150 2 years ago

I've thought about that for a while now. My car knows how fast I am going and it now knows what the speed limit is, so all it needs is a little printer to print out the speeding tickets.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

And yet you still refer to it as "My car".

standardUser• 2 years ago

Do whatever you want with it, just not on "our roads".

o11c• 2 years ago

knows what the speed limit is

In my experience, it knows what the speed limit might have been at some time on some road. Not necessarily the one I'm actually on or at the current time.

chrstphrknwtn9• 2 years ago

Yeah, having driven long distances in all kinds of rental cars with speed limit information shown on the dashboard, the car "knows" the speed limit accurately about 50% of the time.

jerrysievert• 2 years ago

My car knows how fast I am going and it now knows what the speed limit is

does it really know what the speed limit is?

apple maps in Oregon is frequently wrong about speeds - there are rural routes near me that are 55mph, that apple labels 25mph and refuses to change.

genocidicbunny• 2 years ago

Probably an artifact of being California centric. Afaik, California has an implied speed limit of 25mph (or is it 35?) when there's no posted limit. Oregon defaults to 55mph on most roads with no posted sign.

cogman102• 2 years ago

My car reads traffic signs to try and tell me what the speed limit is, it's wrong ALL THE TIME. The problem is signs that say things like "55 after midnight" or "65 for trucks" are interpreted as "55" and "65".

And when it is relying on mapping data, it's not uncommon for it to mistakenly think I'm on a frontage road because the GPS/map is off by enough.

sitkack• 2 years ago

The "legal argument" that Ford is making, "municipalities are forcing us to collect this information, and in turn we are taking 40% of ticket price".

Apple and Google have all of this information in bulk.

jsat3• 2 years ago

If we cared about traffic violence, speeding would be a solved problem. But we don't.

colonelspace2• 2 years ago

"Traffic violence" implies deliberate acts intended to cause harm, but I don't think that's what you're referring to.

mdanger007• 2 years ago

You've never seen aggressively dangerous driving? Must be nice living there.

superkuh4• 2 years ago

Of the subset of unintentional crashes it's hard to say how many of them are from irresponsible driving behavior. But I do know that the vast majority of people driving around me on highways/freeways/etc do not obey the speed limit and instead just sort of travel in high speed flocks. Like they don't care that they're operating extremely dangerous vehicles doing an extremely dangerous thing. This is not intent to cause harm but more like playing catch with a loaded firearm.

shkkmo3• 2 years ago

"Traffic violence" implies deliberate acts intended to cause harm

Not really. The violence of traffic crashes increases as the speed increases.

jsat3• 2 years ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence

gruez7• 2 years ago

If we cared about traffic violence

The trend of "slapping a 'violence' label after anything vaguely harmful but not actually violent" is so tiresome.

jsat3• 2 years ago

Look up the most common causes of death in America and come back

vundercind• 2 years ago

Oh wow. I definitely don’t want my car looping me into someone else’s legal issues. Any chance it’s gonna make me have to show up in court for something I had nothing to do with, is too much chance.

PlunderBunny• 2 years ago

It will drive you to court!

buildbot4• 2 years ago

This kind of automated ticket (or beyond, think apple on devices scanning) enforcement is straight up police state/Fascism - do you want to live in a world where your existence is at every second scanned for illegal acts?

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years ago

I don't know how this is fascist

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Dystopian?

jonhohle• 2 years ago

It often makes me think of Rick from The Young Ones[0].

0 - https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/07/everyones-turning-i...

chank7• 2 years ago

It's more something Fascists tend to do. Strict Monitoring/Policing of the populace to elicit desired behavior.

coffeecloud5• 2 years ago

“Existence at every second” is very different than “when choosing to drive on a public road”

chank7• 2 years ago

It is, but it's also a slippery slope to constantly monitor behavior in order to coerce a desired response.

Dylan168074• 2 years ago

It's a little bit different, but not very different. I object strongly to the idea that if something is in public then unlimited surveillance is acceptable. Cameras everywhere magnifying the eyes of the government by orders of magnitude is a very bad thing.

People exist in public. There should be very little tracking as a baseline.

spankalee7• 2 years ago

Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.

Speeding, reckless driving, running red lights and stop signs is absolutely rampant where I live and people really do die because of it.

I'm tired of entitled assholes thinking that they can drive however they want, endanger everyone around them, and that they just have the right to do that. Even if they don't value their own lives, we value ours.

So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers. Not sure sure about cars self-reporting, only because you could just buy a different car. There is a pretty strong argument that cars have no need to be able go 50+ mph over the speed limit like they can now.

bigthymer• 2 years ago

Maybe a better middle ground is that other people can record and report you instead of being forced to report yourself. This way, people can freely drive how they want so long as they are respectful of others around them.

chank7• 2 years ago

Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.

We don't use armed police to enforce traffic laws. Police mainly monitor traffic as a revenue device. It's already been proven that monitoring traffic and automating fines in fact promotes reckless driving and causes more accidents than it stops.

jimmaswell3• 2 years ago

For one thing, automatic enforcement is imperfect, and people who can't afford to miss work to go to court will be disproportionately impacted by false positives.

More importantly, this kind of infrastructure as a whole is dangerous to put in the hands of the government. Next election cycle it could be put to use for purposes you certainly don't agree with. The government rarely gives any power back that it's given.

xscott• 2 years ago

So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers.

That's because you (naively) don't think it will be abused. You can easily find articles and news reports where they report shortening the yellow lights so that the cameras were profitable.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=shortened+yellow+light+to+p...

freitzkriesler2• 2 years ago

"if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about."

People like you are why we have the current post 9/11 police state.

more_corn• 2 years ago

I just got a super annoying ticket for going a reasonable speed (30) in a spot with an unreasonable limit (20mph) pretty sure the automatic enforcement is about revenue not safety.

chrismcb• 2 years ago

Enforcing traffic laws are good. Automating that is bad. Who is to say what the sure limit is? My car has sign recognition. There is some construction and the freeway drops to 35 mph. There is a sign that says that. But at the exact same place is an off ramp to another freeway. Speedlimit is greater then 35 mph, but my car thought it was 35 because it saw the sign. Sure it is an edge case, but there are a lot of edge cases. Automatic law enforcement is a bane on society. It is there to increase revenue, not to make the roads safer.

tootie• 2 years ago

It absolutely is not. Police State does not refer to excessive policing. It means police enforcing political agenda. Frankly, the US has a disgusting excess of traffic fatalities and no Constitutional protections to driving. I think heavy-handed safety enforcement is entirely warranted.

ranger_danger4• 2 years ago

I do agree with your point, but I wanted to mention that lately I have found that, in a philosophical way I guess, everything is political whether we want it to be or not. What's not an agenda to you, IS to someone else. Even if it's merely your inaction to do something, whether calculated or not.

Unfortunately this seems to be the cause of a lot of debates... just differences in opinion over terminology basically, but I think people all too often don't look at it that way.

on_the_train• 2 years ago

There is no privacy value of vehicle speed. But it offers great value to society when it's being automatically enforced according to law. I think the pros outweigh the cons heavily here.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

Then the cars need to limit their own speed and ticket Ford etc for making a vehicle that violates the law.

MisterBastahrd• 2 years ago

No they won't. Because future Fords that detect speeding are future vehicles from a defunct manufacturer.

jwineinger• 2 years ago

Thus generating aftermarket demand for car cellular modem faraday cages

echoangle• 2 years ago

Just wait until they block your ignition if you don’t have signal

monksy• 2 years ago

This is the always online DRM that we saw in the consoles all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics

m3kw9• 2 years ago

You man a API where police servers can just subscribe

ben7799• 2 years ago

This is coming whether we like it or not. At least in the US the average driver seems to have this incorrect idea that driving is a right and speeding is a right.

Making the cars safer hasn't been working as drivers are managing to kill more people as the cars get safer by behaving more and more badly. So this is going to be the next thing once the public gets sick of the carnage.

Ford is likely working on this because the EU is finalizing rules to make cars warn drivers when they're speeding.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

Clickbait title. In the patent “Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds.” Key word: others’. They’re essentially discussing tattle mode. I could see myself turning it on for e.g. 25 over on the freeway.

mikestew2• 2 years ago

What do you mean, clickbait? Why is the 2nd car taking pictures of mine when I'm over the limit, and what is the intended use of that image? I'm not saying that you didn't read TFA, but I don't think you read all of it. Take a look at that flowchart that's toward the bottom. And what is referred to with the word "pursuit" in that flowchart?

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

What do you mean, clickbait?

I read the “you” in the title to imply it’s reporting on its owners. That’s a massive breach of trust.

Why is the 2nd car taking pictures of mine when I'm over the limit

I’ve snapped a license plate of a reckless driver and sent it to 311. This is the same thing, except the car is doing it for me.

eschneider• 2 years ago

This isn't going into production, for the obvious reason that customers would flat out hate it.

This is on a patent because at many manufacturing companies legal comes by a few times a year to collect patentable ideas from engineering, and someone coughed this one up. Simple as that.

fsflover• 2 years ago

This isn't going into production, for the obvious reason that customers would flat out hate it.

Like the "telemetry" on Windows?

philip12092• 2 years ago

Enforcement is always a losing battle.

Look at red light cameras. New York City introduced red light cameras in 1994 to stop offenders. In 2022, NYC cameras issued 618,000 red light violation tickets.

If you want to limit behavior, use engineering. Add speed limiters to cars, or speed bumps to roads.

spankalee7• 2 years ago

One of the core problems with enforcement right now is that municipalities rarely impound cars because of unpaid tickets. So often you'll see that someone that caused a major fatality crash had thousands in unpaid fines.

I think if we just took away cars and licenses, and eventually throwing people in jail, it would have a huge positive impact.

philip12092• 2 years ago

We've normalized car culture so much that we forget how dangerous cars can be to pedestrians. And, we've built cities to favor cars over people. Prioritizing pedestrian safety will take a lot of work.

Japan values pedestrians. There, it's a 3-year prison sentence for drinking and driving.

ranger_danger4• 2 years ago

I don't consider it a losing battle if the punishment is severe enough. But I also don't object, in principle, to cars reporting each other speeding.

jbjohns• 2 years ago

I used to get a lot of tickets until I cruise control got reliable traffic detection. Now I have it on almost exclusively. The only places I get tickets now are usually places that the speed changes and I don't notice.

I would like to set my cruise control to just be "current speed limit". If these cars are going to start monitoring the speed limit to the degree of being able to tell if you're breaking the law, they better have such a setting. If they don't then it seems almost like some sort of entrapment.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

would like to set my cruise control to just be "current speed limit"

The one Tesla self-driving feature I want on my Subaru.

fragmede• 2 years ago

blue cruise is amazing for that, though I'll note that there's a setting for how much above the speed limit you're comfortable with, so you could set it to 0, but you can also set it to 14 over limit and it'll cruise control quite well, turning and braking for you.

archagon• 2 years ago

How do folks get so many speeding tickets in the first place? I’ve never gotten one in my life.

sublinear2• 2 years ago

Might depend on where you live. Not all roads are created equal.

I'm thinking stuff like many posted speed limit changes within a short length, damaged or missing signs, non-obvious construction and school zones, road passes through varying types of neighborhood, speed limit unexpectedly low for the design, etc.

By far the most annoying to me are off ramp speed limits that are so unrealistically slow they'd probably cause rear-end collisions or pile ups if anyone actually tried to obey them.

jijji• 2 years ago

if they advertise this patent as a "feature", i'm sure the result will be less people buying Ford vehicles

MattDaEskimo• 2 years ago

To promote self-driving cars, I would start by implementing intrusive surveillance, such as speed monitors. Next, I would lobby the government to allow this data to be used for prosecution.

Make it fearful to actually drive. a similar effect to speed cameras. Who doesn't go 10 over in typical loose traffic?

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

lobby the government to allow this data to be used for prosecution

Criminal speeding is typically 25+ over. If you’re doing 50 in a 25, yes, you should be prosecuted.

arduanika• 2 years ago

Title should not have an apostrophe. (Is that too on the nose? Minor infractions and all...)

sublinear2• 2 years ago

If anything, this system would be useful to help avoid high speed chases. This still wouldn't obsolete GPS darts though (unreported stolen vehicle scenario).

Otherwise I'd expect the cops to ignore almost all requests to catch a speeder, and I'd expect local courts to become so overwhelmed that they'd ignore reports without multi-dashcam evidence. They'd also have to implement their own validation against known posted speed limits vs what the car thinks the speed limit is.

There are also legitimate reasons to speed up such as avoiding an accident. What used to be an act of defensive driving is now a ticket to fight? That's ridiculous and by no means uncommon.

Shouldn't the patent office do a sanity check on decidability for ideas involving computers?

puppycodes• 2 years ago

I can't help but laugh at the idea of this being implemented and the immense drop in sales for ford vehicals that would follow.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

In the application, Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds. If one car detects that a nearby vehicle is being driven above the posted limit, it could use onboard cameras to photograph that vehicle. A report containing both speed data and images of the targeted vehicle could then be sent directly to a police car or roadside monitoring units via an Internet connection, according to Ford.
[...]
It's unclear what legal argument Ford would make should it try to implement this tech, as human police officers wouldn't be witnessing the alleged speeding being reported through the connected cars. Speed cameras already provide stationary enforcement of speed limits, but they can only issue tickets based on a vehicle's license plate number because they can't confirm who is driving.

That's kind of my first question - isn't there a chain of custody problem or something? If I took a picture of a car and texted it to a cop with the message "hey this guy is speeding", I would fully expect them to discard it on the grounds that they can't prove it and frankly have little reason to believe me. Why would they believe this? And if they do, how hard is it to abuse? Are we going to see "how to give anybody you want a speeding ticket" blog posts?

dave3333• 2 years ago

Simpler just to limit speed to the limit. Have the car do the policing for free. I just drove from LA to San Jose on I-5 (400 miles of mostly two lane freeway) using speed control set at the speed limit and it was very easy when everyone is going at that speed. Problems arise when there are slow trucks or people driving over the limit trying to pass any way they can. E.g. slow truck A passes even slower truck B and blocks the fast lane for speed limit traffic.

m4632• 2 years ago

I suspect setting it at the exact speed limit leads to excessive passing of your car under good conditions, decreasing safety. In poor conditions, it might be too fast.

It is much safer to go with the flow of traffic, which can vary due to lots of factors, but on a clear freeway will generally be slightly above the speed limit.

I tried the telsa full self driving mode at the speed limit, and it leads to frustrated people behind you. There is also an AUTO setting that adjusts to the flow of traffic and it blends much better with traffic.

EDIT: data on speed variance vs safety (fig 4):

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/...

dave3333• 2 years ago

Not sure about optimal speed, but long term it makes sense to have technology police speeding and minimize accidents whatever that takes for free.

m4632• 2 years ago

This will turn the world into one giant HOA.

also, I suspect speed information gathered in this way couldn't be used as evidence in court, it would not be certified speed information.

GolberThorce• 2 years ago

and that's a good thing

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Tesla being served with subpoenas or warrants re: recordings made by their products after purchase and automatically sent to Tesla.

Future Ford's May Detect Speeding and Report You to the Cops

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