Proposed bill puts speed governors in California cars

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FILE – Traffic on the Hollywood Freeway, Dec. 12, 2018, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

The days of high-speed chases in California may be numbered.

A new law proposed by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents parts of San Francisco, would require all new cars sold in the Golden State to have devices installed that would stop the vehicle from going more than 10 mph faster than the speed limit.

“Senate Bill 961 requires changes to vehicles directly, including a first-in-the-nation requirement that all new vehicles sold in California install speed governors, smart devices that automatically limit the vehicle’s speed to 10 miles above the legal limit,” said a press release from Wiener’s office announcing the proposed legislation.

“Speed governors,” the statement explains, are “vehicle technologies that prevent vehicles from exceeding a certain speed.”

The law, which would affect cars sold in the state starting in 2027, would also require “side underride guards on trucks, to reduce the risk of cars and bikes being pulled underneath the truck during a crash,” the statement says.

Not all cars would be subject to the speed limitation devices.

“The bill would exempt emergency vehicles from this requirement and would authorize the Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol to authorize the disabling of the system on other vehicles based on specified criteria,” the proposed legislation says.

“A violation of either of these prohibitions would be punishable as a crime,” the bill also says.

A second, related bill, the release says, “requires that Caltrans, the state transportation agency, make physical improvements like new crosswalks and curb extensions on state-owned surface streets to better accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, the disability community, and transit users.”

The proposed laws were sparked by an increase in vehicle-related deaths, according to the statement. Statistics cited in the release show that traffic fatalities in the state have gone up by 22% from 2019 to 2022, compared to 19% for the U.S. overall, and in 2022, 4,400 Californians died in car crashes.

“The alarming surge in road deaths is unbearable and demands an urgent response,” said Wiener in the statement. “There is no reason for anyone to be going over 100 miles per hour on a public road, yet in 2020, California Highway Patrol issued over 3,000 tickets for just that offense. Preventing reckless speeding is a commonsense approach to prevent these utterly needless and heartbreaking crashes.”

Wiener’s office noted that reckless driving has gone up since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with speeding-related crashes going up around 23% from 2019-2022.

Under the law, the speed governors installed in the cars would contain technology to pick up on the local speed limit and adjust as needed.

“Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) refers to systems that use GPS technology and sometimes on-board cameras to determine the speed limit on a specific roadway, issuing driver warnings through audio, visual, or vibration signals and/or limiting vehicle speeds accordingly,” the press release says.

In Los Angeles, the paper notes, for the first time in a decade, there were more traffic deaths in 2023 than homicides.