Also depending on what's in the car, they may know who was driving it.
How long before a speed safety campaign starts arguing that car manufacturers should be handing over information about people breaking the law in their cars to law enforcement...
An obvious example would be in Germany. The autobahn for example has sections that are unrestricted, but those same sections are 130kmh (or sometimes lower) if it's between certain times or raining or whatever.
Half of the time my car interprets that as just being 130.
Outside of that; there are countless instances of my car thinking I'm in an 80kmh zone when it's actually 100, 120, whatever. I can override that because I know what the actual speed limit is. Would the car be constantly reporting back that I'm doing a bad?
Ultimately I reckon perfect enforcement of this would just stop me bothering. I'll get someone else to drive me around like an Uber and they can take the endless tickets instead.
Where there are dynamic speed limits in place, it would be plausible to report back possibles (car location and speed) which could then be checked against a central database which was more accurate.
I'm not suggesting that such a system is a good idea, but that I can see car safety campaigners looking on it as the next step in their campaigns...
If the law were strictly applied the cumulative offences would result in virtually all drivers of “smart” cars being instantly banned from driving
You would like to think saner speed limits could be agreed as car brakes and safety have rather improved since the 70mph limit was imposed...
The really stupid thing about this is that driving 80+ and the occasional hard braking is just normal traffic condition on some roads at some hours. Penalizing people for needing to use those roads at those times and acting like every other normal human around them when doing so defeats the point of insurance.
Which I suppose could theoretically be done far more easily.
If the GPS coordinates are within the ring road of the city and no limit higher than your current speed exists there then you're a baddie and we should bust through your ceiling.
Personally, if we're going to use car telemetry I'd be far more in favour of having the system decide whether someone is actually driving dangerously rather than deciding that 55mph on the North Circular at 2am is worth hitting someone's license up over.
You won't be allowed to break the law. The petrol heads will complain but they will lose because "think of the children".
Little did I realise that was a direct admission I'd been speeding on my way back to the studio!
- ed
(It wasn't even bad speeding (mostly) - I'm in London after all - it kicked in every time I went a mile an hour over whatever limit I was subject to. Very [very] annoying)
The problem is, if more and more people switching to those insurances it becomes very expansive for people who mind their privacy.
I would be completely unsurprised if they've run the numbers and determined that penalizing entire zip codes is far more lucrative.
Cars are required to have certain telemetry capabilities starting in 2020 or 2021 as well. We’ll have automatic inspections and taxation by the end of the decade.
Law enforcement already has fairly pervasive networks of fixed and mobile LPR. You cannot leave most cities without a record of it, and if you attract federal attention, passage through many interstate corridors is captured with LPR and photos of occupants.
Whatever happens, insurers will make it more and more expensive for a human to drive a car once it becomes clear that it's safer for a computer to do the driving.
This is true for all current map providers.
Probably sometime after we have speed limits reasonable enough that the overwhelming majority people do not routinely exceed them and/or the politicians who write the laws stop driving.