Future Ford's May Detect Speeding and Report You to the Cops

This kind of automated ticket (or beyond, think apple on devices scanning) enforcement is straight up police state/Fascism - do you want to live in a world where your existence is at every second scanned for illegal acts?

The "legal argument" that Ford is making, "municipalities are forcing us to collect this information, and in turn we are taking 40% of ticket price".

Apple and Google have all of this information in bulk.

If we cared about traffic violence, speeding would be a solved problem. But we don't.

Oh wow. I definitely don’t want my car looping me into someone else’s legal issues. Any chance it’s gonna make me have to show up in court for something I had nothing to do with, is too much chance.

I've thought about that for a while now. My car knows how fast I am going and it now knows what the speed limit is, so all it needs is a little printer to print out the speeding tickets.

To promote self-driving cars, I would start by implementing intrusive surveillance, such as speed monitors. Next, I would lobby the government to allow this data to be used for prosecution.

Make it fearful to actually drive. a similar effect to speed cameras. Who doesn't go 10 over in typical loose traffic?

I can't help but laugh at the idea of this being implemented and the immense drop in sales for ford vehicals that would follow.

Title should not have an apostrophe. (Is that too on the nose? Minor infractions and all...)

Clickbait title. In the patent “Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds.” Key word: others’. They’re essentially discussing tattle mode. I could see myself turning it on for e.g. 25 over on the freeway.

I used to get a lot of tickets until I cruise control got reliable traffic detection. Now I have it on almost exclusively. The only places I get tickets now are usually places that the speed changes and I don't notice.

I would like to set my cruise control to just be "current speed limit". If these cars are going to start monitoring the speed limit to the degree of being able to tell if you're breaking the law, they better have such a setting. If they don't then it seems almost like some sort of entrapment.

> In the application, Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds. If one car detects that a nearby vehicle is being driven above the posted limit, it could use onboard cameras to photograph that vehicle. A report containing both speed data and images of the targeted vehicle could then be sent directly to a police car or roadside monitoring units via an Internet connection, according to Ford.

> [...]

> It's unclear what legal argument Ford would make should it try to implement this tech, as human police officers wouldn't be witnessing the alleged speeding being reported through the connected cars. Speed cameras already provide stationary enforcement of speed limits, but they can only issue tickets based on a vehicle's license plate number because they can't confirm who is driving.

That's kind of my first question - isn't there a chain of custody problem or something? If I took a picture of a car and texted it to a cop with the message "hey this guy is speeding", I would fully expect them to discard it on the grounds that they can't prove it and frankly have little reason to believe me. Why would they believe this? And if they do, how hard is it to abuse? Are we going to see "how to give anybody you want a speeding ticket" blog posts?

Simpler just to limit speed to the limit. Have the car do the policing for free. I just drove from LA to San Jose on I-5 (400 miles of mostly two lane freeway) using speed control set at the speed limit and it was very easy when everyone is going at that speed. Problems arise when there are slow trucks or people driving over the limit trying to pass any way they can. E.g. slow truck A passes even slower truck B and blocks the fast lane for speed limit traffic.

If anything, this system would be useful to help avoid high speed chases. This still wouldn't obsolete GPS darts though (unreported stolen vehicle scenario).

Otherwise I'd expect the cops to ignore almost all requests to catch a speeder, and I'd expect local courts to become so overwhelmed that they'd ignore reports without multi-dashcam evidence. They'd also have to implement their own validation against known posted speed limits vs what the car thinks the speed limit is.

There are also legitimate reasons to speed up such as avoiding an accident. What used to be an act of defensive driving is now a ticket to fight? That's ridiculous and by no means uncommon.

Shouldn't the patent office do a sanity check on decidability for ideas involving computers?

Thus generating aftermarket demand for car cellular modem faraday cages

This will turn the world into one giant HOA.

also, I suspect speed information gathered in this way couldn't be used as evidence in court, it would not be certified speed information.

Tesla being served with subpoenas or warrants re: recordings made by their products after purchase and automatically sent to Tesla.

Enforcement is always a losing battle.

Look at red light cameras. New York City introduced red light cameras in 1994 to stop offenders. In 2022, NYC cameras issued 618,000 red light violation tickets.

If you want to limit behavior, use engineering. Add speed limiters to cars, or speed bumps to roads.

if they advertise this patent as a "feature", i'm sure the result will be less people buying Ford vehicles

No they won't. Because future Fords that detect speeding are future vehicles from a defunct manufacturer.

This isn't going into production, for the obvious reason that customers would flat out hate it.

This is on a patent because at many manufacturing companies legal comes by a few times a year to collect patentable ideas from engineering, and someone coughed this one up. Simple as that.

You man a API where police servers can just subscribe

and that's a good thing

This is coming whether we like it or not. At least in the US the average driver seems to have this incorrect idea that driving is a right and speeding is a right.

Making the cars safer hasn't been working as drivers are managing to kill more people as the cars get safer by behaving more and more badly. So this is going to be the next thing once the public gets sick of the carnage.

Ford is likely working on this because the EU is finalizing rules to make cars warn drivers when they're speeding.