We need speed governors on cars and watercraft as well as bikes and scooters.
A new electric personal watercraft makes me very nervous.
I shuddered a bit when I saw the image in Wired, and the title Tarform unveils 50 mph electric jet ski designed like a manta ray. I spend the summer on a small lake, barely half a kilometre wide and two km long, and there has always been a sort of unwritten rule personal watercraft (PWC, the sort of official name for these things) were not welcome. Last summer, this went overboard, and one of these things was zipping down the lake at what seemed an amazing speed. At 50 MPH (80 km/hr), it could do the full length of the lake in 90 seconds. And that is not even the fasted PWC out there; apparently, “The fastest a stock jet ski can go is 70 mph due to a gentleman’s agreement with the US coast guard. However, jet skis delivered outside the United States don’t always have this 70 mph limit and can often go slightly faster.”
It’s a lake where people canoe and row and even swim across. I have always thought PWCs were a menace, either mindlessly going in circles to bounce over waves or just racing down the lake. And it’s not just me; in New York City, “City boaters and kayakers generally view “personal watercraft” (as the police call them) with disdain. The riders are essentially understood as the bikers of the surf.”
And now they are going electric, which gives them a green halo. This is the case for every kind of electric vehicle.
There was a bike booth at the home show I visited yesterday and while I was checking out the e-bikes, I heard a guy ask the sales rep “how fast can this go?” He responded “I’ve gone 45 km/hr on it” even though the law in Ontario limits the speed with a governor to 32 km/hr (20 mph). In the US the limit for a Type 3 e-bike is 28 mph, or 45 km/hr, and I suspect a lot of these are being sold in Canada. In Europe, they are limited to 25 km/hr (15.5 mph) so that they play nice in the bike lanes; whenever I have called for this in North America I get 379 comments calling me an idiot and worse. “Cry me a river, and get out of the way. I'll buy a class 3, and soup it up.”
And today, governments throw subsidies at the Ford F-150 Lightning, which is a rocket. According to Car and Driver,
“It's hard to imagine anyone not being blown away by the heroic shove of the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning's two electric motors making a combined 580 horsepower and 775 pound-feet of torque. Nail the throttle from rest and 60 mph arrives in 4.0 seconds flat, on its way to a 12.7-second quarter-mile at 107 mph, just before it hits its 110-mph governed top speed.”
Then there are the e-scooters, which I used a lot in Lisbon. They do not go very fast because they have governors connected to GPS; they go at different speeds depending on where you are and you can’t even park them unless you are in a designated area. They are regulated to the point that they become difficult to use- my last rental wouldn’t recognize the parking area and I had to wander around to find another until it would let me sign out of the app.
The thing is, every electric vehicle has a speed governor. The F-150 does, set at 110 MPH. The PWC does.
In 1923 the city of Cincinnati wanted governors on every car. The industry killed it then and has been fighting governors ever since. In Europe, the EU wants to bring in “Intelligent Speed Assistance”- a GPS enabled governor that would prevent speeding, and the industry has watered it down to the point that it rings a buzzer if you speed. I loved the idea; commenters called me a commie. “Totalitarian regimes that minutely control every part of citizens' lives sounds like a good idea until you have to live under them.”
But the electric mobility revolution that we are in the middle of is the time to take this seriously. As I noted in the recent Repo Man post, every electric car has a computer and a GPS chip that can call home. Every electric vehicle should.
I want that Tarform PWC to go 10 km/hr within 30 meters of shoreline, like the law says it must. I want the pickup trucks to go 30 km/hr instead of racing up our street. I suspect it wouldn’t be much of a technical challenge to do this. The challenge is political; As I noted in an earlier discussion of speed governors: “Imagine being forced to go 25 mph on an empty road engineered for people going twice as fast, in vehicles engineered to go four times as fast. People would get incredibly frustrated.”
I imagine a PWC rider would get pretty frustrated too, but everyone who has to live with them buzzing around already is.
In other news:
In the Heated Substack, Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin describe a conspiracy by big Canadian paper producers to stop bidets or what they call on South Park, Japanese toilets. “We know that Big Oil led a decades-long campaign to downplay climate science in order to keep profiting from fossil fuels. Is it really that implausible to think Big Toilet Paper might be doing something similar?” Read The truth about Big Toilet Paper.
I am a big fan of Japanese toilets and the bidetification of North America. My tale from a few years ago (they are cheaper now): Why I Spent $1200 on a Toilet Seat and Why You Should Too.