Cars to be fitted with speed limiters from July 2022.

In my opinion, they'd be better off spending the money trying to make automated driving (or at least, automated driver assists) work properly. Things like ABS, seatbelts/airbags, better car design (so for example the passenger compartment doesn't break apart on impact, etc.) , have probably saved far more lives than people realise, but instead of giving incentives (and punishments) to car manufacturers to force them to research how to make even better cars (next big thing is AI-supplemented controls IMO, it will save a lot of lives), we get this message of 'Dont Speed' as if that will solve everything. By that logic, we should ban all aeroplanes, because it's not possible to be safe while travelling at 250 kph on any stretch of land (planes usually take off at 250 kph).

The simple fact is (as the aeroplanes example illustrates) that the "safe" speed for any particular stretch of road (even a straight road like an aeroplane runway) is determined mostly by the features of the vehicle travelling on it - an aeroplane is perfectly safe going 250kph down a straight road, some well-designed cars are also perfectly safe at that speed on a straight road, however a crappy POS car designed with "cheap production costs" rather than "safety and driver comfort" might not even be safe going 120 kph, especially if it's fitted with absolute-bottom-of-the-range-but-still-perfectly-legal-for-some-reason ditch-finder tyres (and of course they'll be unbalanced too, since it's not illegal to fit tyres without balancing them, as such).

If they really wanted to save lives, they should start by banning the sale of **** tyres aka 'ditch-finders', which is something that can easily be done right now. I'm amazed there's noone campaigning for better minimum tyre standards.

The NCT has generally been great for increasing safety on the roads - they could easily test stopping distance in the NCT and pass/fail based on it.

For now, stopping distance is not even considered on a car as far as legality goes - a car that usually takes ~47m to stop from 100kph (eg. tesla model 3) is considered safe for the same speed limit as cars which have ~27m stopping distance at the same speed (eg. porsche 911). If manufacturers were pressured on these items, and we managed to increase the safety stats for the bottom 10% of vehicles, we could all safely travel at higher speeds, reducing our time on the road overall and thus reducing the crashes from driver fatigue.

We may not quite be there yet with fully automated driving, but “assisted” driving has already been used here very successfully for years - eg. Anti-lock braking system. Similarly, AI-assisted driving has the potential to save many road deaths per year.

Its a double edged sword though, a lot of the drivers aids in modern cars are turning people into lazy detached drivers, I notice it myself since I've gotten cars with parking sensors, ESP, adaptive cruise, etc i'm simply not paying as much general attention as I used to in an older car.

Ill be perfectly happy when autonomous cars are a reality on our roads but all this nannying middle ground of "yeah you are driving but not really unless there's an accident in which case it was your fault not the car's" kinda stuff is pretty stupid.

So you’re saying that planes are safe then, once in the hands of trained humans. ie. There is nothing inherently dangerous about going 250kph down a straight road, it’s more to do with circumstances/planning - exactly what I’m saying.

Now I’m not proposing we change the limits to actually 250kph, but we could easily and safely do let’s say 160kph on some straight stretches of motorway instead of 120, if all cars were up to a certain (much higher) standard than the current minimum legal requirements, and still save lives at 80kph due to the better handling and braking characteristics.

The point I’m making is that what’s safe in a Porsche 911 might not be safe in a Chevrolet Aveo, but if we demanded a higher level of safety (meaning handling and braking characteristics, which would help to avoid a crash) from a Chevrolet Aveo as you find in a better car, it would probably save a lot more lives than going down the route of trying to set “perfect” speed limits on every road which is going to fit everyone in all weather conditions etc. - a nearly impossible job as borne out by everyone’s experience of ridiculous speed limits (both too high and too low) in the real world.

I’m well aware that planes apply thrust via their engines instead of their wheels, this has no bearing on what I’m saying - the simple fact is that there are cars on the road right now which are designed to easily go at 250kmh in a straight road, most of these are relatively expensive, but they do exist already. It would be too expensive to demand that all cars be able to do 250kph, but demanding higher braking/handling characteristics will save lives even at 80kph (bottom end cars are usually absolutely terrible handling-wise even when brand new, and legal “cheap” tyres that are sold here may as well be unregulated).

Just cos you can’t see an analogy and say it is pants, doesn’t make it pants.

So basically you are saying that through the reliability of the machinery, professionalism of the pilots, and design of the airfields, they are safe, but we cannot possibly make cars or roads safer, and we should instead focus our efforts on getting people to travel under a fixed speed limit which doesn’t change with the weather and cannot possibly change for every bend in the road, and applies to all cars equally because all cars are equal, and because the biggest thing causing disabilities and fatalities is people breaking the fixed speed limit.

…and to top it off, that better brakes and handling don’t mean much and aren’t going to save anyone. Right.

Just earlier today I was reading about an incident where a driver skidded out on a bend at an 80kph limit and killed a cyclist, and it was determined that 80kph was not a safe speed to be taking that bend at. It didn’t say the name/model of his car but I’d be very surprised if he didn’t at least have **** tyres, or similar.

That’s fair enough, but the point I was making is that rather than getting fixated on speed limits, which is a huge and almost impossible task (speed limit has to be safe for all types of cars on all sections of the limited road, but still fast enough to allow progress through the road in a “reasonable” time and not cause traffic backlogs elsewhere) without standardisation of roads, which itself is another huge/expensive task, perhaps we should focus more on car safety and create better minimum standards for road handling and safety features on cars. I’m not saying to totally abandon all rules of the road, just that in practice, the biggest reduction in deaths over the past 30 years have been due to safety features and road handling improvements in cars, and I see a lot more potential there in saving lives, which will get left unrealised if we instead focus/waste resources on trying to just enforce the current system (diminishing returns)