"Ain’t no snitches riding with us
Ol mo the mouth n***as could holler the front" - Lil’ Wayne
Ooh yes good patent it so other manufacturers won’t do it. It’s a win-win since I already wouldn’t want a ford
Ooh yes good patent it so other manufacturers won’t do it.
Patents don’t necessarily stop other OEMs from using it. It just means they’ll have to pay Ford a fee to license it, themselves.
Welcome to UPS trucks.
And Amazon, and FedEx, and UPS, and DHL…
I a totally meant FedEx. But I thought they were the only ones with police contracts?
They all have telematics in their trucks, and I know they all use the data in the case of accidents to prove fault. Amazon specifically monitors speed and will fire drivers if they do it too much. Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they started sharing that info.
Oh yea, on the same page, it’s just that FedEx specifically have been proven to hold contracts with law enforcement, while the others have not.
Yep, it snitches on other cars!
Let’s be real, close to a majority of Americans have no issue with their iPhone being used as part of a mesh tracking network, even if it helps abusers with airtags.
All they have to do is sell this to people as benefiting them, and they will gobble it up. Hell, chances are, insurance companies will start offering reduced rates if you drive one (and then they buy the data from Ford and increase rates with it).
Instead of paying 2000 dollars a month for your shitty lifted ford ranger you pay 1500 a month for your shitty lifted ford ranger, but the car will… SHUT THE FUCK UP, WHERE DO I SIGN?
The massive difference between AirTags and this is that AirTags (and the whole Find My network, it’s not only AirTags after all) actually provide a useful service to each participant, namely locating their things if they get lost somewhere. This does effectively nothing for you and will only ever fuck over other people (you could argue rightfully so, but still) and provides no value to anyone other than the police.
One wonders whether instance companies will incentivize these vehicles with lower rates.
For whatever the insurance companies deem a low rate driver, sure. But you can be sure that many drivers will be paying more once their insurance company sees how much time they stare at a TikTok videos what “driving”.
Actually. I do wish that phones would fucking tattle on people who can’t be bothered to watch where they’re going while operating 2 ton Hausfraupanzers.
Ooh that’s gonna get your car keyed.
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I was gonna say, they are getting keyed with bullets
The key that opens anything.
Noted: driving 3 mph under the speed limit in front of all fords from now on.
Go for 10mph under. Gotta really be safe.
If I have to buy a “new” car someday, I’m cutting off every antenna I see.
Unable to contact servers; boot loop, car won’t start; manufacturer sues you for breaking licensing agreement with unapproved modifications
Classic cars for me then
my classic car is a 2005😎
That’s why we need right to repair
And a corporate death penalty, if I had my druthers.
Unfortunately just like your cell phone we don’t really need external antennas anymore. In a lot of cases there’s not even a wire inside you can easily cut, just traces deep on the board
What I’ve been reading about on that subject is that cars often have a Telematics Control Unit or TCU that can actually be disabled if you can find it. It’s a box that plugs in to the wiring harness. They also have antennas that could be connected by a wire that you could locate, giving us another option to disable them by just disconnecting the antenna wire. That way the TCU could still talk to the main computers but not be able to send out its data.
If it doesn’t have a wire you could always put in a little faraday cage.
Patent it so nobody is allowed to use it?
15 years max for patents like this. Filling is intent to use and/or charge/profit.
Tbh, if all the ticketing was done automatically, then there would be less of a reason for cops, especially traffic cops. This decreasing their numbers. This could be a silver lining.
or, hear me out… we could just have cars that don’t snitch on us and cops that work under strict scrutiny (or no cops at all if we took care of ourselves as a society)
This was my thought as well. Just because they patent it, doesn’t mean they’ll use it. And it could keep other manufacturers from implementing similar systems.
From a product standpoint, I just don’t understand the reasoning here. Nobody wants this. It’s not a selling point. There is no way to make money off of this without the government getting involved. Just why?
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I speed, and so does everyone else
Why?
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. Speeders are assholes that put everyone in danger.
Our roads are designed to make us think we can go faster than we should and localities have an incentive to keep speed limits arbitrarily low to increase fines from speeders.
Our roads are designed to make us think we can go faster than we should
localities have an incentive to keep speed limits arbitrarily low
Which is it? If speed limits are arbitrarily low then you can go faster. The fact that most people speed and the roads aren’t consistently littered with accidents seems to support that.
It’s both. They make it so you want to speed so they can generate revenue. Wide lanes and low speed limits can yield a lot of tickets
I was driving on a road like that in Scranton with a 45 mph speed limit, doing 50. For about a quarter mile, without any change in the road, it drops to 35 mph. Right in front of a police station. So the cops don’t even have to leave their station to start ticketing people.
It’s both because there is more than one kind of road.
America really likes stroads which give the impression that you can safely travel at speeds that are actually dangerous. We do that often in neighborhoods where we should be going 20-25 max but the design of the roads encourages us to drive faster. Since the speed limit is often actually at a safe speed, the issue of speeding is about the design of the road and not the speed limit.
Larger roads like highways, freeways, and expressways are designed for high-speed travel but often have speed limits that are low for the sake of revenue generation. If you’ve ever driven through a small town where the highway design doesn’t change but the speed suddenly drops from 65 to 35 you know what I mean. In those cases the problem is with the arbitrarily low speed limit as some states have raised the cap up to 80 and have not seen a substantial increase in accident-related injuries and deaths.
Connector roads often suffer from one or the other problem listed above. They are either designed to make you feel like you can go 60 when you should be going 40 or are set at 30 when you could safely go 40. The road design needs to match the safe speed by making drivers feel unsafe when they exceed that speed and not unnecessarily penalize them by not putting the limit lower than that speed.
Both of those result in speeding but have different causes.
fwiw, the roads are constantly littered with accidents and the US has the highest pedestrian fatality rate out of all “western” nations
Um they are
Well, both.
If the road were clear around me, I could easily hold 100+ off the highway. I’ve got huge streets near me with long curves. No problem for my relatively new tires and well-maintained vehicle.
Once we add cars to the mix, I can no longer go that fast. Too many other cars, if I just weave around them, I can go fast again. Who wants all this power sitting behind a Sentra?
Yay! I’m free! Fast fast fast until more cars again. A little bob and weave… Crash.
This road is literally as wide as the highway but the speed limit is 45mph.
The road always has traffic, always construction, always debris from poorly maintained cars or accidents which means you can’t go fast but the road itself was designed for the Daytona 500. The ‘speed limit’ is set for a pace that makes 18 wheelers look fast.
So, the obvious answer said by every Suburban with scrapes on the side and Altima with paper tags is “My car isn’t going to fail or crash and in ideal conditions should have no problem redlining all the way down this thing so I should try that in five o’clock traffic.”
Old, terrible road speed design methods resulting in shit like my drive to work: a long, straight road that’s wider than the nearby highway yet has a speed limit 15mph slower because…?
Usually the answer is “uncontrolled access” I.e. it has driveways and such, and not on and off ramps
I’m curious if this would actually hold up in court as evidence that a person was speeding.
On its own to convict? Probably no. If the technology is hypothetically successful introduced and it pings to police, all they’d need to do is follow a route to the self-snitching vehicle and hit it with some of their own radar or lidar, then pull over the driver.
The vehicle doesn’t self-snitch. It snitches on other vehicles around it. It apparently uses cameras to do it. It’d only be able to tell cops where the vehicle was when the picture was taken, not where it is.
You can tell most of the comment section never reads past the headline
I admittedly only knew it wasn’t self-snitching because I read another comment from someone that had actually read the article.
I did check to confirm before I actually commented myself, though.
That’s even less functional, and is to my thinking not even close to enough on its own to hand out tickets, as some people think this will be used for.
This was several years ago, so the law in my state may have changed, but I do remember reading that dashcam footage submitted by a civilian can’t be used by police to issue a ticket after the fact. It can be used as evidence for or against someone if the police do get involved, though.
To put it another way, the officer has to witness the traffic offense themselves in order to issue a ticket. But dashcam footage could be used as evidence to prove someone either was or was not speeding after the ticket was already issued.
The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
You have the constitution to thank! Same reason red light cameras were deemed unconstitutional in most places.
They could make a system that doesn’t allow the vehicle to speed but I guess allowing it and then snitching is better
That sounds like a really bad idea. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to go over the limit situationally.
Especially when other drivers could potentially put you in harms way that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to evade.
Also what if you need to rush to the hospital and don’t have time for an ambulance? Not great but better than someone dying because they didn’t get attention in time.
I really think you are missing the point here. You say overspeeding may save you, which i think is a very theorical and not frequent occurence but ok, for the sake of argument let’s allow 20kmh above the maximum speed limit, in my country that would be 150kmh, enough to get out of dangerous situation, still way bellow what modern car can do. And you really dont want to go above this kind of speed in urban environments if you’re not a trained professional. Speed limit exist for a reason which extends beyond “when you agree with them” raming in another car and transforming a 1 people emergency into a multiple people one is not a risk we should consider acceptable.
I agree that there’s rarely a good reason to speed. However, most speed limits are fairly arbitrary. Some are too fast, some are too slow.
While i dont necessarily agree with you, it is not my point. I am not saying we should limit the speed according to local speed limit, just that there is no reason ever for an individual car to go above 150kmh (or whatever the highest allowed speed in a country+15% is)
Speed limits are set according to a number of factor from noise, local crash history, density of pedestrians, threshold of the safety equipments (such as rails) , willingness of the governing body to review it, etc While some are not good, I would definetly argue that not all the reasons can be assessed from the driver perspective.
The arbitrary speed limits are often because many city planners still use the 80th percentile rule. Basically, they do a traffic study, then set the limit at what 80% of people are comfortable driving at. So that means 20% will naturally feel like they can go faster. And as they reach the 99th percentile, they’ll feel like they can go much faster.
The issue with this 80th percentile thing is that it has very little grounding in traffic safety or reality; Many roads are needlessly wide and give drivers an unrealistic sense of safety. They’ll feel like they can go 40 or 50MPH, when it’s really a street that is cutting through a neighborhood and is frequented by children playing, bike riders, etc…
And the individual driver is not the arbiter of that. Just because someone feels the speed limits are wrong doesn’t justify speeding
Even ambulances aren’t supposed to speed. They get their time savings with light switching devices and having traffic get out of the way. 99 percent of survivable medical crises have an hour to reach modern medicine as long as proper first aid has been applied.
It’s also almost universally better to slow down than speed up to avoid an accident. Braking changes your speed far faster than speeding up. It also gives you better traction, (literally it loads the front turning wheels with extra weight), and makes a hit more survivable.
We all want to feel like we’re in a Hollywood movie, but we just aren’t.
You should probably read articles before commenting. The cars aren’t reporting themselves.
This is likely for new models of Interceptors so that cops don’t have to hold those heavy radar guns to generate revenue. Instead they can automatically ticket speeders while driving to the donut shop or their next victim’s house.
Cops hate this one simple trick!
No, they love it because they have to do less to cause more misery.
We’ve had the technology for a long time. And speeding really is a contributing factor to motor vehicle accidents and fatalities. If we’re going to have a society that requires being in cars then we need to be a society with severe rules for putting the rest of us in mortal danger.
Make it automatic then, why report a crime when you can limit the speed. Cut out the middle man, also defund the police.
It looks like this system is designed to snitch on the other cars around the snitch car, rather than the snitch car itself.
I’d rather that too.
but what if I only went above limit for 1 second by mistake? vigilante snitching is not the police to decide to give me ticket
Great, investors have a target to short sell in the car industry based on Fords bad product development
This idea seems like what someone would come up with if they’re devoid from the reality of driving and have only been chauffeured around lol
Yeah, nobody would willingly buy this. I certainly wouldn’t. Never mind the obvious perpetual privacy violation baked right in to a hairbrained scheme like this, but could you ever fully trust it to work correctly and not ever randomly (or not-so-randomly) send people up for prosecution under false pretenses? I guarantee you the speed tattle system will be a black box, some dipshit legislator would pass a law making fucking with it or reverse engineering it a crime “because safety,” and then any time the state wants to harass anyone they can just ping somebody’s Ford to spit out a false speeding ticket (maybe even one that’s egregious enough to count as a felony like 130 in a 25, or whatever). And how are you going to be equipped to argue against it? It’s going to be your word against the computer and Ford’s army of lawyers and experts plus the police, in a system that’s already heavily stacked against the defendant.
This will probably only see any actual use being built into police cars and maybe commercial fleets, but not civilian vehicles.
While I wish people would stop fucking speeding (you really aren’t getting there that much faster) and tailgaiting like fucking Talladega nights, I still think this is bullshit and fuck Ford for doing this.
The need:
Don’t drive over people, kids, pets or other items such as personal property or buildings.
The current status:
People don’t do those things because mostly they are good enough not to run you over. Bad people on the other hand have no internal limits to prevent tragedy.
The fix:
You can’t go faster than the speed limit. Bad people can still drive you over or hit your car or house.
You see how this works? The problem wasn’t even addressed. But additionally there’s the problem of “I’m at point A and would like to get to point B but not faster than the speed limit so the cop doesn’t shoot me 19 times in the back of the head.”
The fix: you can’t go faster than the speed limit. This allows you to get to point B. However the cop can still shoot you 19 times in the back of the head even when you didn’t do anything wrong.
How to spot a car company no longer innovating
If my car is going to be a snitch, I want a share of that fat ticket money. ;)
Pay me or GTFO.
Infinite money glitch?
