Today's discussion about the news

I see now a horrific accident involving a child has hit the news, now suddenly everyone's interested in lifetime driving bans for deaths by dangerous driving.

I can imagine a lot of bereaved family members of dead cyclists are shouting FINNALLY.

From the little I overheard at the school gate a lot of people (hint SUV drivers) had some sympathy with the driver.

This guy got 17 years in prison and a further 21 year driving ban. Anyone who sees the sentences handed out normally will already be surprised at the length of the ban.

With automous cars deaths will eventually be a thing of the passed within reason. I'm trying to think of that bloke who's really pushing this Humanity saving technology forward?

From the news report. This guy had clearly been driving incredibly dangerously for years and got away with it - would be interesting to hear what the penalty was for the previous drink driving offense - clearly not enough to put him off.

I suspect there are technologies available already to an £80,000 vehicle that could have slowed that one down and stopped it being such a tragedy. It's a 20mph limit there.

Exactly, in that situation. What about all the other situations/deaths?

No, you both don't care about them do you?

He was doing 140mph so it wouldn't require a particularly sophisticated technology to reduce that by half for a car being hired in the UK.

Autonomous vehicles are already in use, as taxis in some cities in the US. They are going to be part of the problem, not the solution, to traffic in cities.

In the rest of the world, where they need to be trained for every possible weather condition, road type and scenario, they're not coming any time soon as a usable technology.

But... when they do come, I assume they will be speed limited by GPS for the road speed limit, so that can be introduced for all new vehicles without controversy.

The causing death/injury should only be a minor consideration imo

Driving a car at 140mph, while texting & drunk it is almost inevitable that someone would get hurt - if you are lucky enough not to injure/kill someone, it has nothing to do with you and you should be punished the same.

If the guy had been banned for previous drink driving, this may have been avoided.

Quick fag packet calculation, Q5 weighs around 2 tonnes:

At 20mph = 0.08MJ of energy

At 70mph = 1MJ

At 140mph = 4MJ (about what is released by 1kg of TNT)

I found this interesting on autonomous taxis:

I think that's part of the reason we see so few prosecutions, the CPS feel that there is a high risk that enough jurors will be empathetic to a driver who has been 'a bit unlucky'. They stand a better chance when the driver is under the influence of drink and / or drugs or has been behaving in a manner that 'normal' drivers find a bit dodgy so for example speeding would have to be massively over the limit.

Last sentence, I can think of at least one person on this forum that would find it controversial and the media would be highlighting it as the latest case of wokeism and war on motorists. I suspect it could be retrofitted through the software of a lot of vehicles already on the road. It would also be very easy to restrict cars sold in any country to be unable to go faster than the maximum speed limit in that country. Why is any manufacturer selling to the UK able to boast that their vehicle can do 150mph?

Or if you plead you need your vehicle for work you get a curfew to only allow to drive for work.

Or make them in some way responsible for their actions when they allow dangerous drivers to continue driving - even just a basic risk assesment would be a start and some sort of mitigation such as the black box and restricted speed/driving hours.

According to this, it's 20% of people with 12 points+ who successfully argue 'exceptional hardship' - suggests that the bar is set way too low.