Speedometers should store speed for last 10-15 minutes of driving
I got a ticket on the 1st of December, a trumped up charge for reckless driving through the Virginia countryside. My wife and I both looked at the speedometer when the trooper started flashing his lights behind us, and we were doing 72-73 tops. We’ve got a MINI, and it’s really hard to miss the speeds. That speedo is stuck right in the middle of the dashboard, and it’s big. The trooper said he clocked us at over 80, then came back with a nicely rounded figure on the ticket: 85 in a 65 mph zone. Isn’t it so nice of them to round off our speeds? I know that gives me a really warm and fuzzy feeling about cops… Anyway, I tried telling him about our real speed, but it didn’t matter to him. It seems reality and truth do not affect troopers one way or the other…
Later in the evening, as I mulled over the injustice of it all, I got this idea. Why shouldn’t speedometers in our cars store the speeds we’ve been driving at for the past 10-15 minutes? The computer could sample our speed every 5 or 10 seconds, and then graph it nicely and be able to spit back some figures at us: maximum speed, average speed, instant speed at certain time intervals, etc. We should be able to review that data, and confront these ticket-happy cops on the spot with real data from our cars. Of course, this sort of a system should be tamper-proof in one way or another, so it can’t be tweaked by hackers.
I really think this would solve a lot of the problems with false speeding tickets. One could go to court with a printout from our cars listing the speeds we drove at the time of the ticket, and we could also obtain a certification from our dealer or mechanic stating that our speedometer is accurate and hasn’t been tampered with, and then we’d have some real ammunition against all these cops out to make quotas and other such injust nonsense.
Are you interested in using this idea? Then please see my rules about using it.
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[...] It’s still okay, because everyone gets their due, one way or another. Life has a funny way of making you pay for the bad things you do. Plus, there’s a fix for police lies when it comes to supposed traffic violations, but auto manufacturers would need to step up to the plate and implement it. [...]
Pingback — January 7, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
There is already a fairly large fleet management industry, that addresses this kind of thing. We, a smallish South African company are one of the largest players worldwide.
If US cops are anything like South African ones then having evidence at the time of the “offence” will buy you nothing. You will be given a ticket and will have to go to court and present your evidence to show why there was no offence. Therefore the data needs to be recorded for somewhat more than the last 15 minutes.
Our ShurDrive product, currently only available in South Africa, is aimed at private motorists and this blog post gives an indication of how the recorded data might be used, although in this instance, not in the same context.
Comment — October 3, 2007 @ 10:26 am
Good stuff, Steve! I didn’t know about that. If only more people knew, we could stick it to these lying, thieving cops and troopers who think nothing about shafting innocent people just so they can make their quotas.
Comment — October 3, 2007 @ 10:31 am