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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Hu? The "evil" thing here are cars (emitting poisonous gases, driving climate change, making loud noises etc.) and their reckless drivers (racing those cars in inner cities, not paying attention, claiming losing control of their vehicle was an "accident"…). Anything that limits their use and the freedom of their self-centered users is good.

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It's really narrow minded to find all drivers reckless when you clearly cite pathological behaviour that's adopted by a minority of drivers. It shows you do not evaluate this rationally and makes your argument less credible.

I would argue that the minority of people actually observe speed limits, most people drive over the speed limit out of habit, sometimes only to overtake but a lot of drivers do it and I get a lot of road hate for driving at speed limit or below.

From personal experience, I know that most drivers I interact with on a daily basis are reckless and needlessly endanger others for their personal convenience and comfort. This starts at parking on pavements and cycle lanes, not stopping at zebra crossings, going above the speed limit and all sorts of other incursions.

For example, there was recently a statistic floated around that half the people in the UK had been in an accident. Assuming that all these accidents were one-on-one collisions (unlikely, people also "lose control" all by themselves), this suggests that at least 25% of drivers drive recklessly, as they have caused an accident at some point in the past. I do not understand how 25% are "pathological".

Add to this the number of people who also drive recklessly but for sheer luck have not caused an accident yet and those people who have caused accidents without involving other drivers and the above 25% go up even further.

So yes, I stand by my previous comment.

Heh. That 0.001% of malicious users will just stick to old cars or modify their new ones.

Gas emissions and loud noises are set to be gone pretty soon anyway.

Or are you just too self centered to see through your own narrow minded BS?

Downvote all you like, but it won't change a thing that those wilfully reckless drivers just won't get a new car with these limiters or will disable them and will not be impacted, unlike the millions of others who are forced to pay for more useless gadgets in their cars.

It will simply eventually become illegal to run without these limiters just as it is already illegal to use particularly polluting cars in cities (for example). Of course it will also be illegal to disable them. I don’t see how what you’re describing is any sort of credible loop-hole.

You are already admitting that the current proposal will solve nothing, but will require further steps: prosecuting tampering with the limiters, prosecuting driving a car without them (even unknowingly [!]) and so on. All of that to ineffectively substitute the actual work of the police at the expense of every car owner.

Sorry? Cars are checked regularly (at least every two years for example in Germany) where any tampering can be detected and either reversed or further registration for the car refused. This system is already in place and the process of checking brakes, the engine, lights etc only needs to be amended by a process to check this system. I don’t see how this requires substantial "further steps".

The bad actors learned to remove mods before the inspection and then reinstall them long ago.

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