boomer

Anyone know anything about the following, that appears in the Daily Mail last week (Thursday i think)?

Yeah, like drivers are going to be sooo chuffed to have to fork out four hundred notes to be spied on

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Dracoro

Can anyone put forward a more credible source than some tabloid newspaper? I have as much faith in what the Mail prints as I do the Sun or Mirror.

Brendan Hughes

Here's the EP report on it, though I don't see the voting results:

http://www.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipad...NAV=S&LSTDOC=Y

Rapporteur for this topic, for which you lot will love to blame those Europeans? Gary Titley, MEP for Cheshire.

boomer

Although for some reason, Brendan's URL didn't work on my PC - i had a scout around that site and found the following link...

"Intelligent cars" that call Emergency services could save lives from 2009

No wonder EU membership costs so much

mb

boomer

Oh,

and here is Gary Titley



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OllyK

What worries me, is that in general people won't understand how it works. There will be minor bumps where air bags go off and the occupant has sorted it all out and buggered off by the time the emergency services get there. There will be other situations where the car and the occupant both call increasing the load on the emegency services. Worse yet, cases where the occupant thinks the car has called and it hasn't due to poor signal or other factors.

stew911

that is one hot babe!!!!

speedking

£400 FFS. That's more than the expected cost of ISA which has a lot more data to process. No doubt there will be an annual maintenance charge, and a complicated and expensive procedure when ownership changes. Then like tracker you'll find out it is faulty when you actually need it

Number of accidents I've been involved in in past 18 years when airbags have deployed = one (not my car). Number of times when I've wished emergency services were automatically informed = zero.

When I did have a reasonably serious crash (pre-airbag, but no doubt they would have deployed if fitted) the police weren't interested because nobody was seriously injured. What sort of response will they provide?

Brendan Hughes

BTW, the idea that the EP approves this just to spy on you is laughable - when the Mail say " it has raised fears " they mean "by us journalists over a coffee as we try to make the story anti-EU", or by paranoid Brits. I'd say two things - firstly this is needed the least in the UK as we have the safest roads in Europe, but might be far more relevant elsewhere, and secondly I suspect it has major backing from Finland and Sweden due to their economies doing very well from Nokia and Ericsson.

Given the uptake of mobile phones around the EU it seems almost superfluous, except that they add the Galileo GPS to tell the services where to go - that seems sensible. You could probably just do it with a mobile instead. But then you'd all be paranoid that governments use your mobiles to track you?

Pedro_79

Don't they??

boomer

Mobile phone tracking alone is inaccurate - especially on the kinds of road where you can have an accident and not immediately be spotted (many miles of potential error). But couple a mobile phone as a transmitter, to a GPS system (especially using Galileo) potentially gives them your position within inches, 24 hours a day and your exact speed (including a historical record of what roads at what time and speed).

Await the knock on the door when the pan-European Police (operating across the Prescott implemented Regions) ask "Mr Hughes, can you explain why you parked outside Betty's (unlicenced) Brothel last night between the hours on 20:30 and 20:45" when you had just stopped to collect a takeaway from the chippy next door

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