Anti-speeding technology has just become mandatory in EU cars

Dijana Matošević - 12/07/2022 | 3 min read
Automotive Intelligent Speed Assistance Connected Cars

Starting July 2022, every new car sold in the EU must have a built-in anti-speeding system. All new vehicle models, trucks, and buses must be fitted with ISA - Intelligent Speed Assistance systems and inform drivers in case of speeding.

In case of speeding, ISA systems automatically prevent further accelerating.

Intelligent Speed Assistance in action

Incentivising drivers to obey the speed limits

ISA systems use forward-facing car camera and vehicle’s GPS navigation system to identify the posted speed limit and incentivize drivers to obey the speed limits.

In case of speeding, ISA automatically prevents further accelerating. ISA by no means operates the car breaks; instead, the accelerator pedal simply becomes unresponsive. ISA systems are designed to be overridable - drivers can simply deactivate ISA by firmly pressing the accelerator.

Why ISA?

Speeding being identified as the primary factor in 1/3 of fatal collisions in the EU is the main incentive for introducing mandatory speed assistance in cars. Moreover, in the case of a crash, higher speeding directly correlates with the severity of injuries.

How ISA works?

How Intelligent Speed Assistance work

Intelligent Speed Assistance - overview

ISA’s main strength is pairing different sources to identify speed limits accurately. Because ISA systems may be faced with ambiguous speed-related information due to missing, visually obscured signposts and because a massive 75% of speed limits are implicit (are dependant on road type and surroundings), systems using only onboard cameras for speed limits detection can’t meet regulations to the full extent. Instead, ISA relies on a combination of camera recognition and GPS technology to detect the exact speed limit at a given location.

As stated in EU's ISA Regulation Announcement, systems employing a combination of a camera system, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and up-to-date digital maps are considered the state-of-the-art systems with the greatest real-world performance and reliability.

What ISA mean for drivers?

ISA isn’t a Big Brother

ISA simply aims to provide accurate posted speed limit information and demotivate drivers from speeding by delivering visual, acoustic, and haptic feedback and preventing further acceleration. The driver can opt to ignore and turn off the ISA.

No personal data are recorded

EU forbids ISA systems to continuously record, retain or transmit any data related to speeding incidents other than what is necessary for normal operating.

GPS Navigation is one a step away from ISA

Using GPS to precisely determine the posted speed limit from the digital map data, such as those used in embedded car GPS navigation, effectively means that it’s reasonable to expect new cars to be equipped with an embedded GPS navigation by default. The GPS navigation might have been available in the highest trims of premium car brands twenty years ago, but buying a new car without navigation is, starting from now, highly unlikely to happen.

Embedded GPS Navigation

New cars are expected to be equipped with an embedded GPS navigation by default

What ISA mean for car manufacturers?

Car manufacturers will inevitably need to provide additional features to the new car buyers, embedded GPS navigation certainly being one. As per McKinsey's 2020 ACES consumer survey, respondents were willing to pay up to $13 for advanced map features and personalized GPS navigation.

Euro NCAP now takes speed assistance into account

Euro NCAP (European New Car Assessment Program) further reinforces ISA adoption and improvement. Cars equipped with a camera-only system are scored with only 0.25 out of 1 points, while car models combining cameras with GPS-based systems are awarded with 1 full point.

Starting from February 2023, Euro NCAP will reward manufacturers with additional NCAP points if they can demonstrate that the ISA features can support drivers at least 80% of typical driving on public roads.

Moreover, vehicle manufacturers shall need to provide the approval authorities the information about ratios of the time driven and the distances that are travelled with ISA switched on or off, as well as with the perceived speed limits being observed or overridden. Also, OEMs shall need to provide the data about the average time elapsed between the ISA switch-on and the switch-off by the driver.

Preparing for ISA

Providing complex data such as proving 80% ISA accuracy and consistency and ISA statistical usage data by tracking and analysing enormous quantities of driving data is not a trivial task. These large-scale analytical requirements will inevitably push OEMs to abandon off-the-shelf solutions for spatiotemporal analyses and start exploring state-of-the-art solutions.

Obstacles along the way

Namely, current database solutions do not provide even a close enough solution for storage, report creation, and analysis of the connected car data. When it comes to extra-large connected car datasets, none of the Big Data tools on the market can cope with it - GeoMesa, GeoSpark, Amazon Redshift, Oracle Exadata, Hive, Databricks, and Snowflake, to name a few. Features inherent in telematics data (like extremely skewed spatial data distribution) are the fundamental reasons why the time-performance of today's Big Data tools degrades to inefficacy even at low volumes of data.

Analysing connected car Big Data

Analysing connected car Big Data

The next steps

Here at Mireo, we've been tackling these aspects successfully for some time now. As a technological enabler, Mireo’s SpaceTime Analytics Platform bypasses the gap between the connected car's data and parties interested in extracting such valuable data. SpaceTime provides all the necessary components to store and analyze real-time and historical data from millions of connected vehicles on commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of aspiring mainstream solutions.

SpaceTime Interactive Demo

Mireo has been developing top-of-the-line GPS navigation solutions to major OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers for the last ten years, with 20 Million navigation licenses to testify to Mireo’s expertise. While designing the GPS navigation solution, Mireo took special care in its integration with infotainment systems, from the look and feel to the implementation of infotainment's interfaces. The result is an incredible user experience wrapped in quality embedded GPS navigation developed within a minimum delivery time.

Embedded GPS navigation 101

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