SLOW DOWN – or your car will do it for you.

My mobile phone is not by my bed. As a freelancer. MeJulie, with her ‘proper’ job (Medical Secretary, NHS) gets me out of the land of nod and out on the office run so that I get to my desk just after nine.

But I had had a missed call and a text that I spotted as I ran the bath. It was BBC Radio London and I had missed a moment to be on the wireless. Being a half hour after the request – which is like, yesterday on live news morning radio – I didn’t call the mobile, but I did text an apology after confessing I had just got up, to a person who has to rise at 3am to make breakfast radio. OOPS!

But the phone goes again.. and it is BBC News Channel.. and we are talking about the same thing. That new European rules, that we will of course adhere to, (or risk our cars becoming illegal overseas) to auto-limit the speed of cars, are coming in for new cars, from 2022. There will be other mandatory tech as well, all under the ‘driver assistance’ umbrella, in an effort to stop the carnage. (Nasty corny pun intended.)

The idea is that the car itself will take that already existing power to read a road sign and also correlate its position by GPS to verify the speed limit of the road you are on, then instead of beeping, or turning the pretty speed limit sign on your dash – be it in the screen of a new car’s binnacle, or the screen of a thing like a Road Angel, to a scary red tone, it will do more. It will send the same power limiting instruction to the drive train to slow down. This happens at the absurd top end in really quick cars. My car is limited, way below 155mph but does have one.

At the moment, the system promulgated is overridden by a squeeze of the accelerator. BRAKE, the road safety charity said, “These measures will provide the biggest leap forward for road safety this century” while the spokes-body for the AA said, “the best speed limiter is the driver’s right foot”

Personally, I went on record on the BBC News Channel saying that this would upset AC Schnitzer, Alpina and AMG in Germany as well as ProDrive over here, who soup up Mitzy Evos and Scoobies to allow the feds to catch folks racing the Eurostar at 160mph between junctions eight and nine on the M20 in Kent. *I didn’t name a brand.. or but barely… and also said it was going to be ‘Car Guys’ (all sexes, OK, guys?) and regular folks. The former will hate it and the latter will be delighted. But car guys are big money and the status of a fast car is about to be emasculated. I foresee BIG car company power in Germany in particular, having an opinion and wielding some clout, yet.

It was again, later on in the day, with BBC Radio Three Counties, just before 4pm, that I was on air again about it. Thing is, it is just a part of the beginning of automation. The beginning of the end of ‘driving’. It is about the elimination of the most useless part of any car, for safety reasons.

And that, dear reader. is the Nut Behind The Wheel. You and me.

Oh, and the BBC news was national TV, on Skype.. and I hadn’t twigged that the screen was going to be full of my awful hoorah’s nest of an office. Complete with industrial sized bag of Monster Much behind me. (Other varieties of corn starch based snacks are available) They said, ‘Oh can you turn on your camera?” and then “Oh can it be moved any close to to you?” But I could not as it i built into my Mac screen.. and embedded in tat, like a pewter pikefish, and all sorts of nonsense. So I was a bit overkill grin struck by the end.

Thank god the show is not on iPlayer as a rule.

Because of this new technology, maybe one day I can stop by ending with Do be careful and avoid the old BOOMPH…tinkle….

Oh and they might turn the FM radio transmitters off by then. Hahahahahhaa haaaaaaa! (Bad taste DAB joke for industry-Knowledgeable people.