All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance – or colloquially, a speed limiter.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator. Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in.
An Ambulance is expensive anywhere in the world. The only question is how do you hide the expensive. Most of the cost is having several vehicle with trained personal sitting around doing nothing just waiting for someone in need. If there is ever a time when there is one vehicle not ready to go but doing nothing you don’t have enough service for a potential worse disaster. Of course that means there is lots of room to hide the costs if you don’t want to tell the truth - which many do not.
When I took an ambulance, they charged me $1800 (after insurance) for a 10-minute ride to the hospital. That covers a lot of “sitting around” time for a group of people earning $15/hr. Just 10 calls in one day is close to $20k in revenue, or close to four months worth of pay for those two EMTs, and that ambulance is running 24/7.