Bill in California: electronically limiting the maximum speed of vehicles to 80 mph (128 km/h)

US State Senator Scott Wiener of California has proposed a bill to limit the maximum speed of vehicles to 80 miles per hour (about 128 km/h). The limit on Californian roads is 70 mph (112 km/h). This would be achieved by installing an electronic speed limiter on new vehicles built or sold in California starting in 2027, which would be mandatory for both cars and trucks.

The package of proposed legislation, called Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets, abbreviated to Safer California Streets, includes SB 961 published on 29 January, which essentially requires speed limiters to be installed on new cars and trucks built or sold in California beginning in the year 2027. These vehicles would have to be equipped with an 'intelligent speed limiter system' that electronically prevents the driver from exceeding the 80 mph threshold.

Speed limiter technology would not be applied to emergency vehicles. The bill also says that the device would have the ability to be temporarily disabled by the driver, but it is not clear in which situations this would happen. The bill also states that car manufacturers would be able to disable the speed limiter completely, but presumably only for emergency vehicles. The Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol could also authorise the deactivation of the speed limiter at his discretion.

Wiener himself commented on Abc7 News, announcing the proposal, 'I don't think [the bill] is an excessive leap forward at all, and I don't think most of the citizenry would see it as an excessive leap forward. We have speed limits, and I think most people support speed limits, because they know that speed kills."

The proposed legislation is an attempt to address the rising number of traffic fatalities, which in California rose by 22% from 2019 to 2022 according to data provided by Trip, a national transportation research group. A separate report by the U.C. SafeTrec in Berkley found that from 2017 to 2021, speeding-related fatalities in California increased by about 30 per cent, while in the entire United States they grew by nearly 24 per cent over the same period.