It is not easy to understand the way the European Union is functioning lately. And with the European Union we mean the European Commission, the parliament that decides all those measures that regulate what happens within the 27 member countries and that are increasingly difficult to understand.
And we are not talking about the bottle caps, no, we are talking about far-reaching reforms that affect and will affect the lives of the more than 450 million inhabitants within its borders. In the automotive world we have been seeing for some time the implementation of systems that ensure both safety and emissions and that have, in effect, made vehicles safer. A clear example in motorcycles is the mandatory ABS, an important active safety element.
But there are other aspects that have a worse reception by a large part of the population, and they are those that are arriving lately and those that are yet to arrive. The European Commission is studying systems that can intervene automatically if the speed limit is exceeded.
Right now there are many new vehicles that warn in a different way when speed limits are exceeded, and which are called ISA (Intelligent Speed Assistance) systems. They are mandatory on all cars approved in the EU from 2022 and have to be installed on all new cars sold from July 2024.
In this case the difference would be that right now these systems can show visual warnings, emit audible alerts or add resistance to the accelerator when they detect that the limit is exceeded, but they can even be disconnected or cancel their intervention. Meanwhile, what is being studied is that with technology based on satellite positioning, GPS maps and on-board cameras, it could be possible to act on the vehicle’s response.
For now, this measure being studied by the European Union does not make it clear whether or not it would affect motorcycles.
If this type of system in a car would already entail a series of risks that would have to be solved, for example an overtaking that by necessity requires exceeding those limits for mere safety, in the case of motorcycles acting directly on them would increase the risk of falling.
To this we must add all the purely functional issues and seeing the state of the roads currently, something that does not seem to matter too much to any government in terms of the victims it causes, there could be the possibility of unindicated time limits, outdatedness and endless unforeseen events that, to be honest, the slow elephant that is the EU and its bureaucracy would have a difficult time foreseeing and solving.
And yes, the big problem in all these types of regulations is that most of those who end up making the decisions that influence all of us in our pocketbooks and our security often do not have either the knowledge or the necessary interest, moving, and it is worth the redundancy, for very partisan interests or pressured by some lobby.
That is one of the reasons, there is no doubt, that each new initiative that comes out of Brussels is received with increasing skepticism by citizens who only notice that each decision that is made negatively affects their pocketbooks. And we must not forget that implementing all this technology is not easy or cheap. We will have to wait for future decisions to see what all this turns out to be, but when the river sounds…
Of course, this possible regulation would leave another question to answer later: what would happen to fines for speeding? Maybe it’s something they haven’t fallen into, who knows.
