Cars to be fitted with speed limiters from July 2022.

There will be a way to remove this feature through OBD and reinstate it if the NCT ever insist on it being installed. There is a lot of sh1t going down in the car industry now, with the government and megacorps hoping to convert everyone to driverless mobility services. This kind of thing and the rent-a-feature model they're trying to introduce is like DRM for cars

Wait and see time... so for it to become mandatory in July, means that its already built into even todays cars? Just needs activating? I have in addition to the Vehs own Satnav, a TOMTOM SatNav.....and it has a warning klaxon whenever the speed limit is broken.....and by God, its effective!!! With the first "BOING" you will instinctively lift your foot off the accelerator. That's fine for me, I don't need the computer making decisions, and especially as I'm the one having the full picture of the situation on the road.

Will you be able to reinstall it when the Garda pulls you over?

Possibly. Not that it would be necessary at least in the form that they are proposing it

Don't be cycling on the M50 Andrew, it's asking for trouble.

The future is boring, I remember when it used to be exciting but ironically the utopian technophiles have ruined it.

The new 'Black box' will keep a log of any updates done to the ECU. People will try to disable the safety features but won't get away with it as easily as they can now

Agreed some people do some idiotic overtaking moves and some people for instance drive along bumper to bumper like a train at 60kph on an 80km road safely but they shouldn't drive bumper to bumper if they have no intention of overtaking they should leave space in front of them for cars to overtake them and pull in safely. Everyone can contribute to safer roads even those who drive reasonably and carefully without crazy overtaking .

My 2013 car had Attention Assist. While it didn't even used a camera monitoring system like many new variants do, it was uncanny in recognising when I was tired. It would even sometimes tell me to pay more attention when I was on a handsfree call. It monitored everything you did including steering wheel movement to build up a picture of you as a drive, and if you deviated from that it would alert.

I had a 2008 Volvo (released in 2004) which would store all of your driving telemetry, even including radio volume, which could be accessed with a warrant after a serious collision.

Despite what backstreet car mappers tell you, a modified map will be immediately obvious to the manufacturer should they be requested by the Gardai to check the engine ECU.

IMO none of that is new for European car manufacturer, it's just now being legislatied for.

A big problem is that speed limits on Irish roads are (in my experience) not well-related to road conditions. I know of N-roads where the limit should be 80, not 100, and R-roads where the opposite is true. Another example is (or was?) the Kilkenny bypass which is single carriageway with frequent roundabouts and 100kph mostly, whereas Waterford ring road is mostly dual carriageway and some long distances between junctions and is or was 60 or 80 kph. Crazy stuff.

Limits can be altered by local authorities, who appear to differ in their approach. Add to this the general incompetence of most local authority road engineering..

Safe driving is largely about adjusting speed to the prevailing road conditions. It would help if the limits were better related to these conditions.

With the exception of say understeer or oversteer on a corner, almost everything else has another "principal cause" than speed.

I think speed cameras are far less effective in reducing deaths and serious injuries than other methods of enforcement (Gardai), but of course slowing down will reduce the severity or allow you to stop in time for another idiot.

If I drove anywhere close to the speed limit for many of my journies, I'd be dead within a week. We need a much more holistic approach to read safety than speed alone.

Rightly or wrongly, I firmly believe that most (not all) drivers who cause fatal collisions have had it coming for a very long time, and were finally caught out.

Where are all the crashes?

Most people are lucky most of the time. But the stakes are a bit too high to rely on being lucky.

AGE don't routinely investigate phone use at crashes, in the way they check for alcohol levels. This policy needs to change.

The car pulling out was at fault, stop trying to pretend that it wasn't or that speed is the problem. Your facetious argument is reductio ad absurdum, because you end up with a conclusion that the only safe way for a vehicle to move forward is to have a footmen in front of it walking or jogging waving a red flag.