For context for international readers, the UK has a lot of speed cameras and other automated ways to give out fines.
These get sent by snailmail to the 'owner'[simplification] of the vehicle using a government database. The owner must then, within a deadline, say who was driving the vehicle at that date and time.
If the owner fails to say who was driving, they have committed a criminal offence, and will be fined.
It looks like Tesla has in a bunch of cases not declared the driver on time. I'm willing to bet that's due to them just being slack with records in some cases - for example loaner cars, offences which occurred on the same day as a sale from person A to person B, etc.
18 offences across the whole fleet of >100k cars isn't much really, when you consider ~30% of motorists receive a fine in any given year.
It's a ludicrous system – I've experienced it first hand.
If for some reason the letter isn't delivered (or indeed sent), the original offence is scrapped and a new offence issued for Failure to provide information.
Frustratingly, there is no obligation on the Police to provide proof of posting, and per the law, it is deemed received once sent.
Try proving you didn't receive something...
The primary alternative is to have signed delivery, in which case some people will simply refuse to sign it and thus prevent delivery. Signed delivery is the way the postal service usually differentiate between normal delivery which has some kind of error rate which the postal service do not take responsibility for, and the signed service which usually carry some insurance (up to a maximum) of delivery.
The US has their Service of process which is commonly seen in movies, which is often made into a joke in comedies.
A much older system is the one where by law people had to put a notice in the news paper, sometimes multiple notices, and then that was considered enough proof of delivering the notice.
It would be an interesting conversation to philosophy how a future system should be designed that can't be refused, where delivery to the recipient is guarantied, and where the sender and the delivery service must produce proof of their parts.
My father worked on the early 90's contract that implemented the speed camera's on the motorway. The future road map was to make these digitally automated. Dark Fibre was laid but the plans were scrapped as the government saw it as a waste of money. This is why we are stuck with the ludicrous system.
For a long while if you were changing lanes while speeding through the camera it couldn't capture the plate. Again the government didn't care. Of course now resolved with the archaic future technology we have now.
I'm not sure what the technology by which the data from the speed camera is downloaded has to do with identifying the driver?
The reason for this "ludicrous" procedure is that the police can identify the owner of the car (based on the license plate), but not the driver, so the owner has to say who was driving. And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail. The same procedure exists in Germany (of course, the bureaucracy here has its ludicrous sides too) and I bet in other countries as well.
In Finland automatic camera fines (they're not exactly fines but I have no idea how to translate "liikennevirhemaksu" so work with me here) are the problem of whoever owns the car. If the owner wasn't the one driving the car, then it's up to them to inform the police who was actually driving
Interesting! If I translate it from Finnish to German, Google says something along the lines of "traffic violation fee". Usually you can't punish someone for something someone else has done, but maybe if you call it a fee (which doesn't imply punishment) instead of a fine, you can (at least in Finland)?
Reminds me of the fines for using public transport without a ticket in Germany: they're not called fines either, but "erhöhtes Beförderungsentgelt" ("increased transportation fee"). I'm sure there's a very good reason for this name too...
"Traffic vioaltion fee" is a great translation. As far as I understand the logic behind them, they're meant for relatively minor violations where a fine would be kind of overkill and specifically have to be "directed" at the right person.
The downside is that unlike fines which scale by income here – the term is "päiväsakko" or "day fine", a fine unit that scales with net income – the fees are fixed sums, so unless a person with high income really does something heinous with their car, they're not as likely to get 200k€ (really) speeding tickets.
So now if you're rich you can speed all you want and pay a relatively small fee for it, as long as you're not doing 200km/h in a school zone or something like that
> And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail.
This needs to change. Snail mail is no longer reliable. Letters often get delayed by weeks or go missing altogether, but the law still assumes that justice is being done by it being sufficient to assume that a letter that was posted has been received within a few days. It's no longer true.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to just issue the fine to the owner of the car? The owner allowed the person to use their car and accepts that responsibility. If it was stolen, then just say so. Even in the case of fleets, someone is responsible for know who is operating the vehicle and when. The gov't shouldn't care about it any further than holding the owner responsible. If the owner doesn't want to rat out the actual driver, then the owner takes the hit on points/fines/whatever
Speeding is a criminal offence, lying about who was driving is punishable by prison.
> Dark Fibre was laid
And now you would never bother laying fiber to a speed camera when you can just put a SIM card in the thing.
That is indeed ludicrous - I bet the same does not apply to your returned information either.
Correct. Obligation is on the individual to prove receipt by the Police (in the event they claim you didn't respond).
I believe that for Royal Mail at least, proof of posting is considered sufficient to work as proof of receipt.
that's difficult when most post is dropped in a metal box on a street. But I'd argue that not the issue people have with the way these laws work in practice.
For those that don't use the UK postal service, Royal Mail has a recorded delivery option that can show that, at least something, mostly likely what was sent, was delivered to the address.
The issue here is that the UK government has given itself a pass that, 'trust us, we sent it' is fair and legal, while at the same time refusing to allow not the government to use the same argument.
People tend to get upset when laws and legal defenses are asymmetric, doubly so when its skewed to protect the bureaucracy at the expense of the citizen.
Just for reference the Royal Mail uses complaints to track losses, in the year 2017-2018, Royal Mail received 250,000 complaints for lost items, out of around 6 billion items processed [0]. Of course that requires that the sender somehow knows that the item was lost, so losses are likely significantly higher.
Without a recorded delivery, 'I never received what you sent' should absolutely be a valid defense. Although, 'Trust me I sent it', should not be a valid argument for either side, unless they can show that the item was send and received.
[0] https://descrier.co.uk/business/how-frequently-is-post-lost-...
It's ludicrous that the British put up with those laws, at some point they have to assume responsibility.
Tesla finance seems legendary in this regard. A friend here in MA got hauled down to city hall because their auto excise taxes were 3 years overdue - they're the responsibility of the owner of a leased car, in this case Tesla finance. According to the person there, the town (50K people or so) had a bunch of Tesla owners in the same boat.
> ~30% of motorists receive a fine in any given year.
Really? Or have you (or someone else) just divided the number of fines by the number of motorists?
Original source:
https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/drivers-receiving...
I suspect the division method.
That’s a horrible system. Britain used to be famous for the professionalism of their police and now they can’t be bothered to make a traffic stop and give people speeding tickets face to face.
I’m a bit biased here, because a close friend’s mother was killed by someone speeding through a red light.
I think automated enforcement of minor driving infractions is a good thing. More efficient use of government resources. Incentivizes drivers to follow the rules of the road.
Now, I'll be the first to agree that you're biased, but surely you see that the rules and norms of the road are generally far more nuanced and not necessarily identical the rules of the road as the government writes them?
There's no reason motorists shouldn't be able to go almost any speed on motorways, conditions permitting. Germany's system is fairly sensible in this regard and many American states have one or two good laws that correlate well with norms and should be adopted elsewhere.
If the rules and laws actually reflected norms of behavior there would be more appetite for enforcement.
Except that this:
> automated enforcement of minor driving infractions
Would not have prevented this:
> someone speeding through a red light
It's the think-of-the-children fallacy
It wouldn't prevent it, strictly, but proper enforcement would stop people from getting into the habit of driving that badly.
Surely less people will do that if they get fined for it?
Except, it does. People worried about getting a fine will not chance a light on yellow. This is patently obvious for anyone that has ever driven in London (where I learned to drive).
Anyone that doesn't care about the fine (perhaps in a stolen car) may still do it, but they'd do it regardless.
Ah yes, the risk of small fines that is why people won't do dangerous things. Have we tried a £50 fine for murder?
Economist brain.
The problem is very simple: driving tests aren't hard enough, too many people have driving licences, and we don't retest people. In addition, enforcement of people driving without a licence is completely pathetic (as anyone who has driven in the UK can attest to, the stuff I have seen over the past few years is insane...obviously there is an underlying cause but if you see a clapped out hatchback, Just Eats bag in the front seat, P plates on the car, you know to steer well clear...as if the multiple dents on the car already didn't give it away).
Automatic enforcement of dumb low level stuff is supposed to free up police time for the more serious things. Whether that happens or not is a political decision. I remember the time before red light cameras in London, and the time afterwards, and the situation was much improved after they showed up.
I agree the driving test is too easy (though several orders of magnitude more difficult than in the US states I've had to do one in), and there is too little enforcement of otherwise dangerous behaviour.
I don't think I mentioned anything wrong with automatic enforcement. I think the claim was that when confronted with a financial incentive, people who drive recklessly will stop driving recklessly. Would this be the case if we paid people £50/month to drive better?
It makes no sense at all. The problem in policy is generally that you have people talking past each other: speed limits are effective for people who are generally going to comply with them anyway, they are not intended to stop serious accidents. The majority of accidents are not caused by "accidents" (as most people on here would think them), they are caused by people who drive recklessly a huge proportion of the time and eventually have an accident.
Again, the solution to this is simple: do not give these people driving licences. In the UK, you can kill someone with your car driving recklessly and be out of jail in 18 months. And I don't think people realise this is true, or that this won't have been the first "near miss" for these people...it will have been months and years of doing stuff that will kill someone, and eventually killing them. How are they supposed to kill people with cars if they can't own a car?
They can still be professional, but Tory cuts made there be a lot fewer police (23,500 police cut from 2010-2019: https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/shock-figures-reveal-23500-polic...) so they don't have the manpower to sit about waiting for speeders.
The UK is not alone in using traffic cameras to enforce speed restrictions. There was a funny example in Germany where their automated cameras blur the face of any passenger... leaving them to be unable to see who was driving a UK left-hand-drive car with Animal from the Muppets in their passenger seat: https://boingboing.net/2008/10/27/german-traffic-cops.html
your source...is a union? really? you can look at ONS numbers yourself (and you will see this isn't the case).
Scotland has seen a drastic reduction in police numbers (unfortunately for you, not a Tory government :( oh well) despite record government funding levels. Labour's plan appears to be attempting the same trick with consolidation of forces, which should allow massive reductions in numbers. In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England, and the expected time to respond to car accidents is usually 6-12 hours (this includes situations with serious injuries).
There is a lot more going on here than funding because government has never had more resources. The Tories, to their credit, actually put money in but (even then) the results were no better.
Also, in response to original comment, I am not sure why you think the Police are competent. Much of the policing function of a few decades ago not lies with private companies. Police numbers are generally high but the level of output has never been lower. You are seeing this in multiple areas of the public sector, public-sector output hasn't increased since 1997 whilst govt spending to GDP has basically doubled. The police have massive structural issues with their remit in the UK because of demographic change, and it is generally seen as a career for people of low ability resulting in fairly weak performance. It doesn't feel complex but than you realise that people don't understand that a politician looking to get elected might say it is even simpler. Does anyone actually work at a company where more spending increases results? I have never seen this to be the case. If anything, more spending seems to lead worse results.
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England,
Scotland is smaller than England, so this makes no sense.
Furthermore, anyone who drives regularly in Scotland knows this to be completely false - there are plenty of traffic cops around (sometimes incognito too), and they are sometimes even seen waiting in rural and semi-rural areas.
Again, there are not. The number has fallen significantly...I am not sure what you are arguing with (or why). You can just check because the number of police and the number of traffic police is reported. If you just Google, you will see that the current staffing level for overnight in Scotland is two cars for traffic police.
I live in a rural area, I have done so for two/three decades. When I moved here, you very often saw police doing speed checks because I live in an affluent area and the police would come out if you asked the right people. I don't think I have seen that for fifteen years. Again though, the data is that the number is way down since consolidation...which was the point and stated aim of the policy.
Hilarious to see pearl-clutching when people point out the SNP has been doing this after complaining about the Tories. This is why the UK is so shit, reality doesn't matter, just politics.
> you can look at ONS numbers yourself
ONS numbers say >20,000 fewer frontline officers from 2010-2018, which is pretty much in line with what the union said. See the graph here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-workforce-en...
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England
Are you high, or did an AI write this?
Area of Scotland: 80,231 km^2
Area of England: 132,932 km^2
So on some days, in Scotland, there is one traffic car covering an area that is larger than Scotland. OK, where's it patrolling? Or are you saying Police Scotland only sends out 60% of one car to cover the whole country?
2010-2018...when did the Tories time in government end? Based on your comment, I am assuming 2018.
Lol, quite the pedant. To be clear though, yes when they are short-staffed they only have one car actually on patrol for the whole country (iirc, the actual full staffing policy overnights is two cars...which you can see has been covered by the media).
Traffic was consolidated into Police Scotland so there is only one police force, and so there aren't local forces patrolling a local area. I believe the total number of traffic police is something like 400 now (which is mostly not people on patrol) and so, overnight around holidays, the policy is to have two cars which turns into less than that on some occasions.
I disagree. As much as I hate speed cameras, the way they’ve been implemented (meaning, the fact that you get a letter with evidence and it’s clear you committed the offense, and usually no points, like you might get from a cop) seems to strike a balance of fair punishment.
Now, whether they’re that effective at reducing speeding is a bigger question. Because people just slam the brakes for the 100 feet around the camera and then resume speeding.
They're sort of damned if they do and damned if they don't, aren't they? If they make traffic stops for speeding people will moan about how they're just trying to meet quotas or ask why they aren't going after "real criminals."
People just want to drive irresponsibly and they will invent any reason to justify why they're the victim, actually.
You've inadvertently completed both parts of a proof by cases. We don't want speeding laws enforced at all right now, because most speed limits are way too low, because they're set for reasons other than actual traffic safety. Let's raise all speed limits to the 85th percentile speed first and only then talk about stepping up enforcement.
I actually quite like the system. They tend to only install speed cameras at high hazard areas e.g. where fatal accidents have occurred. Also the camera's are mostly super visible - bright high-vis yellow, and there are often warning signs as you approach them.
It's quite a different story in other countries at least in terms of visibility!
I avoid speeding issues by the one weird trick of not speeding.
Besides, money is a big factor here. If you want to make it cost-effective for someone to physically flag down speeders and ticket them, you'll have to raise the ticket fines significantly. And (sensibly) the revenue goes to HMT and not the individual police forces, avoiding America's perverse incentives, so you'd have to raise the police budget as a separate line item.
(pursuing speeders is right out - police chases are extremely discouraged for obvious safety reasons)
You can't avoid tickets from speed cameras just by not speeding. You can't even avoid them just by not driving! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY38N4vnhzI
And besides, as other commenters pointed out, even if things get lost in the mail or the government otherwise drops the ball, they'll still consider that your fault.
They do do this as well - but speeding was/is such a people killing epidemic and cameras scaled better than people and are cheaper.
for the skeptical: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
There is nothing unprofessional about it. Austria and German have cameras and send the ticket to the owner of the car - based on the plates.
There is no reason to insist this must be face to face thing.
This story is exactly the reason to insist that: cars can be driven by people other than their owners.
Here, you can enjoy them here:
So now you've got two cars speeding down the road and a complete waste of limited police resources when you could just have a speed camera.
I've never seen someone being against a system like this that wasn't pro speeding themselves.
There's a great generalization that conveniently excuses you not having to engage with viewpoints you disagree with.
"Almost 4,000 defendants have been convicted in courts in England and Wales in the last two weeks for failing to identify the driver of a vehicle under police investigation, leading to fines ranging from £1 to £1,000."
"Tesla has been convicted at least 18 times"
So, Tesla are 1 of 4000. I feel the article is missing a bigger story here to make it about Tesla.
The difference is (presumably) that they are the only auto finance company doing this and therefore should have a more rigorous standard applied than the individuals who make up the remaining 3982 cases.
20k in fines, so just over half of cost of 1 Model 3
> The British arm of Elon Musk's electric car giant has faced multiple criminal court proceedings over the past two years linked to alleged road traffic offences.
> Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
> Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.
Given that this is coming out of the UK, I thought it was going to be about some Orwellian request for Tesla to detect speeding and report it to the police. It's actually a much more reasonable situation where Tesla is failing to identify drivers of leased/rented cars and Tesla clearly seems in the wrong.
> Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
> Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.
More specifically Tesla basically just paid a small set of automated speeding camera fines on behalf of their leasing customers, which include some glorified late charges because they didn't reply promptly.
Very happy - the £100 fine isn't the problem, it's the points/day-wasted-on-useless-course that is the real deterrent to speeding.
And before people say "think of the children" and "I learned something I should have already known on the course" - Speed limits are increasingly being changed for political reasons: Safety has nothing to do with it, therefore, these arguments no longer stand (my local authority is determined to make cars as slow as buses, and is more than happy to "set aside" any suggestions that they do not do this).
Yes, anti-motorist policy is thinly veiled.
Local councils are willing to admit they are directly harming the interests of people peacefully going about their legitimate business, in order to try to manipulate their behaviour.
It's all such zero sum thinking. Rather than reducing congestion (and thus pollution) by making the roads more efficient, they prefer to make them LESS efficient (with LTNs, modal filters, speed bumps, chicanes, one-way etc) in the hope that this will discourage traffic. All it does is move the congestion from one place to another, and make the situation worse overall.
Deliberately clickbaity title from the UK national broadcaster. Same broadcaster which brazenly manipulated video footage of speeches of the US president around the time of the US election.
The reality of this story is nothing as nefarious or significant as the headline suggests. It's simply that Tesla has absorbed liability from a handful of people caught speeding in loaned vehicles from Tesla centres in the UK.
Furthermore, it seems that the UK bureacracy may be at fault, as Tesla staff tried to enter the plea online but "encountered a technical issue on the Online Plea Service portal".
Thank you for offering an objective analysis of the story. Too many people go to it with pre-conceived bias against this particular carmaker. If you replaced it with 'Ford' the article would never have been published.
If Ford offered loaners and wasn’t cooperating with police to identify the speeding drivers it absolutely would.
It wouldn't be necessary to publish, because Ford (presumably) comply with the law.
It’s a precise and accurate headline.
Reality check: the issue with Donald Trump video manipulation is that media are consistently showing him more coherent and saner then he actually is.
If you'd seen the before/after video clips you'd understand that this is a pretty big deal. The BBC spliced two separate video clips nearly 1hr apart to make out that Trump was an insurrectionist.
Original quote:
"We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women"
Manipulated BBC version of quote:
"We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I'll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjPlfUt4S9U
If you dislike Trump, you should be angry at the BBC for lending legitimacy to Trump's "fake news" narrative.
And still, overwhelming majority of manipulation os making Trump saner and more coherent
And yes, he was responsibke for the violent attempt to overthrow the election. And yes he is both criminal amd failed businessman.
> brazenly manipulated
Interesting talking point, but I guess the far right talking points are gaining traction on HN as well.
> gaining traction on HN
Not new in the slightest.
your car is a talking-to-the-fascist-cops machine now. truly dystopian shit
[flagged]
You switched accounts before reposting. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733330)
And then switched again to reply to themselves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733370
lingrush4 and me (chrisbeach, the OP of that comment) are unconnected. Likewise mjparrott.
And I didn't realise my original comment was flagged (!). Thanks to whoever vouched for it.
Quite sinister how people misuse the flagging tool on this site, to try to hide any opinions they find personally inconvenient
Seems like some kind of weird quirk that the government doesn't already have this information readily available. Why isn't there a registration process for the person that leased the car?
The answer you seek is right there in the article (emphasis mine):
> Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
> Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.
A company leases the car, and that car may then be available to multiple employees. The police need the company to confirm which employee was driving the vehicle at the time of the office.
The answer is not in the article. The question is: why isn't there a registration process for the person that leased the car? How are rented or company cars even relevant, since that's a different company between Tesla and the driver that would have the information about the driver? It seems like a weird quirk that there's not a registration process closer that leads somewhere closer to the actual driver. Is it a privacy issue? Is it just because enforcement is easier against a larger company?
If you lease a car the owner of the vehicle isn't the driver, but the lease company itself. Tesla was contacted to provide the drivers name (as is their legal obligation) and when they didn't they were fined.
Exactly the same is true if you own the car outright. You as the owner of the vehicle will be contacted and asked to provide the details of the person who was driving at the time.
I just realized something: doesn't this allow the actual drivers to escape the non-monetary penalties?
In the UK, if a driver is caught speeding, they'll (generally) also get points on their license and after accumulating 12 points, they'll (generally) lose their license for a while. Points decay on some frequency which I forget.
Anyway, what's to stop someone from driving a company car and then just paying the fines via the company and refusing the name the driver?
> Anyway, what's to stop someone from driving a company car and then just paying the fines via the company and refusing the name the driver?
In Germany when that happens and the company cannot (or does not want to) name the driver... they may get ordered by the authority to keep a logbook. And such an order shows up at any police checkpoint - and if the cops run the plate, they will ask for the logbook. And check the logbook. And if the logbook isn't up to speed... that means some hefty fines.
Germany isn’t required to keep a log book? In Netherlands we had to keep details on clock, distance, driver, and reason for all use of the company vehicles.
The police should have information on people who have broken the law (assuming the laws are reasonable and proportionate – for the moment, let's make that assumption). The police should not have information on non-criminals, except as far as it is genuinely necessary for an investigation. (To the extent that the police do things other than investigating crimes and making arrests, the relevant information should be compartmentalised and handled separately.) I am willing to tolerate large amounts of inefficiency, and even some bad guys getting away, if it ensures that the police do not begin to get results by looking only under the street light (which, if nothing else, will lead to sophisticated offenders getting away more easily). Pre-emptively requesting records just in case they're needed is a very, very bad practice, and we must oppose it if we want to live in a free society.
This is also why I tolerate the widespread use of CCTV cameras, but strongly oppose CCTV networks. Closed-circuit television needs to be closed-circuit, with friction of access requests proportionate to the amount of footage requested, or it goes from an accountability tool to a mass surveillance tool.
While I largely agree, this isn't a question of having broken the law or not.
The registration is _literally something issued by the DVLA_, so of course government agencies have access to it. The problem in this specific case is where the registration information is not enough to indicate the likely driver.
Convicted 5 times... if this was a natural person it stands to reason their license to operate a motor vehicle would be revoked. However, a "corporate" person faces no such consequences. What is the equivalent of jail for these "corporate" entities who are more than happy to pay fines.