New cars in California could warn drivers about speeding

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The state of California may eventually join the European Union in requiring all new cars to be equipped with speeding warnings. The proposal is aimed at reducing traffic fatalities and, if passed into law, would likely impact drivers across the country.

The federal government sets nationwide vehicle safety standards, which is why most cars now honk when a seatbelt isn’t fastened. A bill in the California Assembly — which passed the Senate on Tuesday in a first vote — would go even further, mandating that all new cars sold in the state must honk when exceeding the speed limit by 10 miles per hour or more by 2032.

“Research has shown that this actually helps get people to drive slower, especially because some people don’t know how fast their car is going,” said Democratic Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, the bill’s author.

The bill narrowly passed on Tuesday, an indication of how difficult it could be. Republican Senator Brian Dahle said one reason he voted against the bill was because people would sometimes have to drive faster than the speed limit in emergencies.

“We are simply creating a nanny state here,” he said.

While the goal is to reduce traffic fatalities, the legislation is likely to impact all new car sales in the U.S. That’s because California’s auto market is so large that automakers would likely simply modify all of their vehicles to comply with the state’s laws.

California often uses its influence to influence national — and international — policy. California has set its own auto emissions standards for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcements to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.

The technology, known as intelligent speed assist, uses GPS technology to compare a vehicle’s speed to a dataset of applicable speed limits. Once the car is at least 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, the system would “emit a short, one-time visual and audible signal to alert the driver.”

California would not be required to maintain a list of posted speed limits. This would be left to manufacturers. These maps would likely not include local roads or recent speed limit changes, which would cause conflicts.

The bill states that if the system receives conflicting speed limit information, it must use the higher speed limit.

The technology is not new and has been used in Europe for years. From the end of this year, the European Union will require all new cars sold there to be equipped with the technology – but drivers will be able to turn it off.

The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were speeding-related — including an 8% increase in speeding-related deaths. This was particularly a problem in California, where 35% of traffic deaths were speeding-related — the second-highest rate in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.

Last year, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that federal agencies equip all new cars with speeding warnings. That recommendation came after a January 2022 crash when a man with a history of speeding was traveling at more than 100 miles per hour, ran a red light and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.

The NTSB has no authority and can only make recommendations.