Here’s the latest reader question, along with my reply!
Brad asks: I enjoy your writing about cars and the road. I just heard from my wife that a mutual acquaintance who owns a Tesla just received a speeding ticket in the mail from the state of New York. He was clocked between two automated tollbooths and the time calculated to travel the distance proved he was speeding. These automated electronic devices span the whole Mass Pike so I’m sure the revenue possibilities will spread this practice throughout the U.S. Traffic ticket revenue with no need for (or no need to pay expensive) cops. (This is one possible positive unintended consequence. This is huge! You do know what this means! The freedom to speed will be gone within five years. Nobody will speed! Or maybe we will just speed on unsafe, two lane back roads where the technology does not exist. It’s going to take forever for me to get from Boston to Pennsylvania. I feel like I have been raped, chained and thrown in a dungeon. I’m so depressed and distraught. Have you heard about this?
My reply: Yup. It’s not new. And, it gets worse. Not only do the roads know when you’re “speeding” but so does your car. If you buy a new car. Many – soon, all – will have the capability not only to “read” speed limit signs (or “know” the speed limit, via GPS) but also the power to control your speed. The tech is called – nauseatingly – “speed limit assist.” It has already been mandated by the EU for all cars beginning very soon. And I expect that it will be at least de facto mandated here, because the tech will be embedded in the cars made there and then it will touted as a saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety feature (like so many others) and made standard equipment in most if not all new cars.
But there is a peanut in the feces – so to speak. If cars – all of them – are speed limited, then “Ludicrous Speed” EVs will have lost the main thing they tout vs. non-EVs, since they can’t tout lower ownership costs or greater practicality.
But this only brings back to the forefront the real reason for all of this – EVs, “assist” tech, etc. Which is to take you out of the driver’s seat – and ideally, out of the car, entirely.
The object of the exercise is restrict and control mobility. To render personal vehicle ownership (and control) a thing of the past, except for the elites.
This is being sold to the Useful Idiots as “environmentalism,” among other things. But take careful note of the fact that the mobility of the elites will not be restricted.
Just ours.
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GPS-based systems can be defeated by locally transmitting bogus GPS signals. GPS can’t be authenticated because it’s just a one-way beacon. So another black box for the dashboard: the GPS spoofer that tricks your nanny into thinking the car has been at home all day while you drive 74 in a 55 with impunity.
To the TPTB, personal vehicle ownership in itself is ‘wasteful’. They say that because our cars spend most of their time sitting; they’re not moving most of the time. If you read environmentalist sites and publications, they’ll point out that most personal cars are only used an hour or two a day, and then spend the rest of the time sitting. To them, this is a waste of resources; look how impractical and wasteful it is to have cars sit most of the time! That’s what they say.
To the environmentalists, we’d all be better off car sharing, using these new transportation modules that we call when we want to go somewhere. There’d be fewer cars on the road; those cars still in use would be used more; there’d be less traffic; and that, of course, would mean less pollution, which would be good for the environment. If we just had car sharing, how much better the world would be! At least according to them…
What isn’t said is that not only would this cut into our personal freedom (to go where & when WE want to); this would also allow the emerging high tech panopticon to know our EVERY movement. We’d no longer be able to go somewhere without some a-hole bureaucrat knowing about it. We could no longer just up and go somewhere because, damn it, we WANT to…