Europe has required carmakers to fit Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) systems to new vehicles since July 2024, with the technology alerting drivers that they’ve exceeded the posted limit.
Depending on how the system is calibrated, it can simply warn drivers that they’re speeding, or even slow them down if required, though the tech can still be overridden or switched off entirely.
The cost of these systems has been attributed to a rise in car prices, leading some brands to think outside the box in a bid to change the regulations and bring spending back down.
Speaking to the UK’s Autocar magazine, Fiat CEO Olivier François said a more cost-efficient way to stop drivers reaching high speeds would be to set a speed limiter of the maximum speed limit in European roads: 118km/h.
Noting the cost benefits for city cars in particular – such as the Fiat 500 and Panda – François believes the majority of these vehicles are being driven in low-speed environments for most of the time, rendering ISAs to keep them in check across all conditions too costly.
“I have a hard time understanding why we need to install all this super-expensive hardware: sensors, cameras, road sign recognition,” François said.
“All this is a little bit inadequate, a bit crazy, and has contributed to raising the average price of a city car by 60% over the last five or six years.
“I don’t think that city cars in 2018 or 2019 were extremely dangerous. Our proposal was literally to say ‘let’s go a little bit backward from overloading cars with expensive hardware’.
“If you take the average legal maximum speed in Europe, it’s 118km/h, so above 118km/h is [often] illegal, and most of the radars, ADAS [advanced driver assistance systems] and all this stuff has been developed for cars to go way above the speed limit.
“I would happily limit my city cars, my smaller cars, to what is today the maximum legal speed limit. It’s already a limitation. There is something weird that I need to over-spec my cars to go above the legal speed limit.”
It’s worth noting only the UK and Europe have mandated ISAs. A number of new cars in Australia feature the technology, however it isn’t a requirement locally.
Australia’s maximum speed limits are also lower than Europe, with a majority of motorways and freeways limited to 110km/h, though some parts of the Northern Territory feature a 130km/h limit.
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