Car Insurance

Spiders in the camera?

Just think of the beep annoyance on a long journey leading to frustration and road rage. :)

No, that can't be true, I haven't met that for some time, it's always 'our robotic helpers', or some such weasel-word. Yesterday, Fedex, who delivered my incoming package to the wrong village on Tuesday and have yet to retrieve it, promised that if the robot could not solve my problem, I would be transferred to an Agent, but he must have been on holiday.

It is here

The drive to remove customer services in order to strip services of customers, continues.

Throughout my working life its nearly always been worthwhile to pay 15% more for proper service and no nonsense support. People who chortle and boast that they 'got 15% discount on their product' are the ones who complain about the delivery or return service or the product quality.

I was paying a under £200 for my old Citroen Xsara Picasso for years and it only crept up a little so I was quite happy. Then I changed the car (ok the Citroen was scrapped after a dismal MOT failure) for a Renault Grand Modus (no, me neither) and the insurance company didn't charge any more.

Then come renewal, the price shot up to £450 so I looked around. To my shame, Saga now insure 70 year old me for a bit under £160.

Ah - a youngster - I passed my test in 1958! and I've had an EV for 4 years.

Just use the cruise control. It mean you can watch the traffic!

Exactly. Speed limits are *dangerous* if you spend more time watching the speedo than watching the bloody road

I do tend to use cruise control on motorways but often do journeys of a couple of hours on winding up hill, down dale type of rural roads.

Using the speed limiter is much better for ensuring you stick to speed limits. The previous car that I had with the camera picking up the road signs would automatically slow you down if the limit dropped. Absolutely essential round N Yorkshire there is not a day when I do not pass at least one radar trap.

Close to where I used to work there used to be* a notorious mobile speed trap location. On a long sweeping rural road bend there was the 30 sign just as you entered the bend, before the 30 it was national speed limit (60mph). The camera was positioned to catch those speeding just after leaving the bend.

Two other locations were at long steep hills. Mobile cameras were positioned half way down on one and at the bottom of the other. the location where the camera was positioned half way down is now a fixed camera further down the road a few hundred metres after the road flattens off.

It tends not to be the cameras in your local area that catch you out. I managed to get a speed awareness course as a result of a radar trap on a bridge over a downhill stretch of the M40 :(

I have seen forward facing speed camera in Bedfordshire/Northamptonshire (????) where drivers in front of me were braking hard but still possibly being caught. I wasn't speeding :)

Ah! But which definition of "solve the problem" applies here, yours or the 'bot's?

Use of AI to set speed limits?

On 30/01/2026 08:42, Timatmarford wrote: <snip>

I got my first provisional licence in 1966. My first car was mid-1950s and I replaced it with a 1952 model after I passed my driving test. I have now got a 61-year-old car as my daily driver so nothing much has changed for me. I shall be 78 in a few weeks time and I normally do less than 1000 miles a year, so that car should last me for as long as I want to drive.

Biology comes into it too. If you are watching the road ahead and you look at the speedometer, it takes a finite time for your eyes to adjust their focus to something that close and then understand what the speedometer shows. If no speed adjustment is needed then the eyes have to refocus on the road ahead and the brain has to work out if anything has changed since it looked at the road before. Physically there will be a minimum of a second between deciding to take your eyes off the road to look at the speedometer, and being aware of the road conditions again, and at 30mph you will have travelled 45 feet or 14 metres completely blind of anything in front of the car.

Other than cruise control & speed limiters, another way to manage speed without losing track of what's happening on the road, would be a Head Up Display projected onto the windscreen. I wonder how well that could work, given the rapid changes in lighting that can take place - (e.g. bright sunlight to shaddow to unlit tunnel)?

And cameras instead of rear view mirrors that add a foot to the car width. Some manufacturers use cameras, seen no feedback though.

Which is why aeroplanes, and our Citroen C6, have 'heads up' displays. It is actually quite handy having one's speed displayed on the screen as it were so you don't have to look down to see what speed you're going.

As I noted above, the Citroen C6 has this, it works pretty well.