At times we all drive faster than the posted speed limit, and often we are guilty of knowing that we are dong so. But there are also times when our speed just creeps up on us because we just get into a bit of a groove. Maybe there aren’t other cars around to pace ourselves, or we get geared up by a particularly upbeat song on the radio, or maybe we are so involved in telling a story to a passenger we simply don’t realize that we are breaking the law.

One day, in the not-too-distant future, I can imagine that GPS systems will have the ability to feed on-board computers with real time updates of the speed limit at our precise location, but in the meantime couldn’t we protect ourselves from tickets and unsafe driving if our cars had a self applied governor that we could set to cap our top speed? Or maybe the better solution would be to integrate a programmable chime or alarm of some sort to notify us when we are approaching an unsafe or especially illegal cruising speed.

I don’t think this would be particularly hard to pull of with late model cars. Of course the radio would need to be somehow temporarily disabled so you wouldn’t miss the warning, and perhaps there should visual warnings also, or a vibration could be sent through the seat or steering wheel. An additional feature could be a maximum speed read out that could be used to contest speeding tickets. This sort of system would be useful when applied to things like taxis, school buses, and the cars of young and inexperienced drivers.