Why Europe’s Mandatory Speed Limiters Mean The End Of Driving As You Know It

The idea of self-driving cars is appealing to many of my friends as they dislike driving. It’s not relaxing for them. It’s not exciting. It’s a necessity that is often expensive and sometimes dangerous. But even for those people, the idea of a mandatory speed limiter isn’t necessarily appealing.

Today’s Morning Dump is all about the interaction between government, industry, and consumers. In Europe (and Northern Ireland), speed limiters are mandated on all new cars as of this weekend. If you can’t drive 88.5 and live on the continent this is your new reality, though there are a couple of ways around it.

Stateside, the existence of restrictions on foreign materials in batteries is leading many companies to scramble to figure out where to source the chemicals they need. So you say you want a hydrogen revolution? No, you didn’t? That’s just an OEM thing? Well, California is also a little less sure it wants to change the world in that specific way.

And, finally, GM is going to fork up about $145.8 million after excessive emissions were found in a bunch of its vehicles that weren’t quite at the emissions levels that were promised.

Mandatory Speed Limiters Are Happening

Speed limits are real, but they’re not generally hard limits. It’s a feature of the social contract that there are laws we expect to be strictly enforced and ones that no one expects to be rigorously applied. I drink beers with my buddies in the parking lot after our ultimate games and, technically, that’s not legal but no cop would deign to bother us for doing it.

Put another way: You can drive one mile over the speed limit and expect to get away with it, but you rob one bank, and all of a sudden there’s a manhunt.

In most places, it’s generally understood that there’s a roughly 4-6 mph grace period above the speed limit where the effort required by the law enforcement officer to pull you over and write you up isn’t worth it to them. There are exceptions, of course. Speed limits in school zones tend to be hard limits, and for good reason. Of course, if a cop wants to pull you over for some reason, they can pop you for doing 55 in a 54 as a pretext for a deeper search.

If you wish to go faster than the speed limit it’s up to you whether or not you want to risk a ticket, points on your license, or possible jail time if you reach felony speeds.

Lately, automakers have been applying new technologies to limit exceeding the speed limit. Most new cars will let you know what the car thinks the speed limit is and warn you, one way or another if you are exceeding that limit. Some cars beep. Most cars flash some sort of symbol on the dash. Some new cars can even be set to stop the driver from going any faster, but that’s a choice the driver makes.

If you’re in Europe, it’s now a choice that the government makes. As of July 7th, all new cars sold on the continent or in Northern Ireland have to have a mandatory speed limiter installed. The system is generally known as Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) and it’s probably going to show up on a lot of vehicles in the United Kingdom as well because the country basically shares a car market with the rest of its neighbors.

Here’s Highway News with some reaction from Britain’s Royal Automobile Club:

Steve Gooding of the RAC Foundation explained that although the ISA tech can be stopped temporarily by drivers, it resets itself every time the car is turned off.

He said: “For now, UK drivers will have the option of disabling ISA where it is installed but I think many motorists will tire of switching it off and they will just learn to live with it.”

He added: “Arguably ISA will mark the beginning of the end of a world in which people choose their cars on the basis of its top speed and the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 60mph.

“It’s a sign of things to come,” he continued. “Increasingly, the car is going to decide what you can and can’t do.”

The system is defeatable, though that comes with its own potential issues as The Guardian implies:

With the precise readings of computers replacing wobbly speedometer needles, however, and a new generation of speed cameras upping the ante on the enforcement side, it may be ever harder to disown responsibility. Lawyers say those who switch off the speed limiter at the start of their journey may have a difficult time if they end up in court.

There’s an obvious solution to this, which is that you can just buy an older car. No one is talking about banning old cars and, therefore, old cars are going to become inherently more valuable to people who want more control.

New cars are mostly not designed for enthusiasts, they’re designed for regular people. Reducing speeds is better for the environment, it’s better for pedestrians/cyclists, and it’s generally safer. It’s hard to argue that other people should be able to go 120 mph in their GMC Acadia because I don’t trust other people. I think many people want this and some people should have it.

But I don’t want it. Increasingly, carmakers are trying to take the role of driving away from the driver. This view sees the driver as an unfortunate necessity, a stand-in for a computer until a computer can do the job. That view is winning. It’s winning in California and it’s winning in other places.

Whether this would work in America is a matter of debate as we’ve already experimented with a national speed limit and it didn’t last long. The great paradox of the American road is that the speed limits in denser urban and suburban areas are clearly too high, while speed limits on America’s higher-quality interstates are arguably too low.

Should Car Companies Become Battery Companies?

The battery requirements in the Inflation Reduction Act are impacting most domestic manufacturers, but even without it OEMs were already trying to figure out the best way to control their own supply chain.

With a few exceptions, the powertrains in most new cars are made by that automaker. On the other hand, no automaker makes its own gas. Because batteries are such a huge part of the value/cost of a vehicle it behooves automakers to not necessarily outsource all of it.

The analysts at S&P Global Mobility have a breakdown of the different approaches to this problem, though the bottom line is that outsourcing is increasingly going out of vogue.

S&P Global Mobility forecasts that sourcing under value chain integration, where the cell, module and pack are manufactured in-house, will increase from 16.7% in 2022 to nearly 21% in 2030. During the same period, outsourcing is expected to fall from about 21% to less than 11%.

OEMs are increasingly looking to balance the risk against the investment required to have a highly vertically integrated battery supply chain. That is the reason behind a lot of partnerships between OEMs and suppliers. This trend will gain more momentum through the end of this decade. Sourcing through partnerships is expected to increase from 7% in 2022 to 26% in 2030.

If you were curious, BYD is the automaker that uses the least outsourcing (it uses zero) because BYD is a battery company that makes cars and not the other way around like everyone else.

Will California Kill The Hydrogen Truck?

I still am highly skeptical of passenger hydrogen vehicles. Unlike electricity, hydrogen is a much less flexible fuel and requires either onsite production or more infrastructure than I think we’re ok with building everywhere. But big trucks? Big trucks follow set routes and already carry huge amounts of fuel.

I don’t hate the idea of a hydrogen semi, whether it’s an internal combustion engine turned into something that can burn hydrogen or a hydrogen fuel cell where the hydrogen creates energy for electric motors. A hydrogen semi would emit less than a typical diesel-powered truck and might otherwise be more efficient.

The less there is the key piece as Automotive News reports:

While emitting only trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the lubricants used in the engine, they still produce smog-forming nitrogen oxides and other pollutants.

California’s Advanced Clean Fleets regulation governs the operation of trucks. It defines zero-emission vehicles as those that produce zero exhaust emissions of any of six commonly found air pollutants identified by the EPA, precursor substances that react chemically to form pollutants or greenhouse gases under any possible operational modes or conditions.

“Under this definition, a hydrogen combustion engine does not meet the definition of a ZEV,” said Kate Lamb, a California Air Resources Board spokesperson.

Given that many other states follow California regulations this is a bit of a roadblock for the non-fuel cell trucks.

GM Agrees To Pay Big Emissions Bill

Here’s another fun thing about the social contract and the legal system in the United States. You can essentially say ‘I don’t think I did anything wrong, or at least I don’t want to admit to it, but going through the legal motions is such a chore I’ll just agree to pay a fine or whatever and get this off my plate.’

That’s what’s happened with General Motors, which agreed to pay $145.8 million and give up the 50 million metric tons of carbon allowances it claimed for vehicles built between 2012 and 2018. Basically, automakers estimate what their emissions are and tell the government.

If the government doesn’t think that’s the case it can investigate and, in this case, it did and found that GM was a little too favorable to itself.

From Reuters via the Detroit Free Press:

In a statement, GM said it “has at all times complied with and adhered to all applicable laws and regulations in the certification and in-use testing of the vehicles in-question” but added it believes “this is the best course of action to swiftly resolve outstanding issues with the federal government regarding this matter.”

GM also paid $128.2 million last year for a similar issue. Both of these were the first time the company had to pay one of these fines in the 40 years or so since the rules were put in place. Is that, too, an enforcement issue?

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

It’s a bad girl summer, with Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter dominating. Here’s another one to get stuck in your head, this time featuring actor Barry Keoghan as the bad boy in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please, Please, Please.” I’m less interested in the lovebirds (though they have some great chemistry here) and more interested in that 1978 Dodge Magnum XE. Holy hell, that’s some great car casting.

The Big Question

Speed limiters, should everyone else have them? Do you want them?