More than 60% of drivers would find it acceptable if vehicles provided an audible and visual warning when they exceeded the posted speed limit. That’s according to a new survey from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
More surprisingly, about half of drivers say they wouldn’t mind technology that makes the accelerator pedal harder to press or automatically restricts speed.
“These findings are exciting because they suggest American drivers are willing to change how they drive to make our roads safer,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “The conventional wisdom has always been that speed-restricting technology would never fly in our car-centric culture.”
This technology, “Intelligent Speed Assistance” (ISA), should not be new to regular readers of this column on traffic law and traffic safety, as I have written articles on this in November 2022 and most recently in March 2024. Speeding is and has been a major problem for decades. About half of drivers admit to driving at least 15 mph over the limit in the past month, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
“We can no longer pretend this is an unsolvable problem,” said IIHS Senior Research Scientist Ian Reagan, who designed the survey about (ISA). “With the technologies we have now, we could stop virtually all speeding and eliminate speeding tickets to boot. Instead, we seem to be going the opposite direction, with adaptive cruise control and partial automation systems that allow drivers to peg their speed at 90 mph if they want.”
More robust ISA systems sound a warning or flash an alert when the driver exceeds the limit — or when they exceed it by more than a specific amount. Others provide accelerator feedback — making the pedal harder to push — or restrict power to the engine to prevent the driver from going too fast. As of this July, the European Union will require all new vehicles to be equipped with ISA systems that at least give audible or visual warnings, though drivers will be able to turn the systems off.
To gain more insight into how American drivers would feel about ISA, Reagan conducted a survey of 1,802 drivers. The survey measured whether respondents would find the technology acceptable. Any version of ISA likely to be adopted in the U.S. would give drivers the option to switch it off, so it will only be beneficial to the extent that the public finds it acceptable.
More than 80% of all drivers agreed or strongly agreed that they would want a feature that displayed the current posted speed limit. More than 70% of all drivers also agreed or strongly agreed that they would want an unobtrusive tone to sound when the speed limit changes. There was a clear preference for advisory systems over those that intervene to control the vehicle’s speed, however. What do you think? Are you in favor of ISA, and which version?
— Dave Werner is vice chairman of the Franklin County Traffic Safety Board.