The Future of Transportation - Big Brother

Hyundai's new Genesis is their entry into the luxury car market and comes with all sorts of bells and whistles including a combination radar detector, obstacle detector, and brake applicator. Now as you drive the car detects not only the posted limit somehow, but also the radar associated with photo traps and automatically slows the car well before the camera flashes.

In TV commercials, it replaces driver awareness by applying the brakes to bring the car to a complete stop before the distracted teenage driver can hit the car stopped in front of him. I suppose that before we can have completely self-driving cars, we need to get the great unwashed public used to the phenomena.

A quick-thinking city bureaucrat would budget money for some flea-powered transmitters to broadcast on the photo radar frequency and install one every 500 yards or so thus preventing the cars from ever exceeding the speed limit anywhere inside the city limits.

"It will beep 800 metres before a camera and show the legal speed, and it will beep at you if your speed is over that."
By coupling those self-braking systems with camera locations loaded into the car's navigation software, the car will warn drivers ahead of speed traps and slow down if required.

At this point the warnings and braking work best when the cars GPS knows where the speed cameras are and less well with the portable camera vans I see around here.

Read all about it here.