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Archived entry | Matt Wilcox .net

Big Brother could slow british motorcycles down

Yet again, the rather stupid and incredibly dangerous proposal of GPS based speed limiters has hit motor policy.

The proposed system monitors a motorcyclist’s speed via a GPS system, and if it detects you’re going too fast, it throttles the engine down. Now, I’m sure this sounds ever-so-good to the morons that came up with the idea, but here’s a thought for them:

Lets imagine that I were a motorcyclist, I’m on the motorway, and I’m in a situation where I really need to accelerate to get out of serious danger - imagine that some dude driving a rather large articulated truck decides to pull out into the fast lane but hasn’t seen me at his side on my motorbike. In another dose of ‘you see it every day’ reality, lets imagine the cyclist can’t slow down because there’s some idiot in a BMW driving up his arse. This proposal makes pulling ahead of the truck impossible, and the chances are that people are going to end up dead because of the decision to allow machines to take over the driving choices that only a person is qualified to make.

I never want a machine making driving decisions for me, a machine has no sense of context, and the concept is lethal. If you’ve got a machine interfering with your driving, that in itself is unsafe, because your vehicle becomes unpredictable.

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