> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
Interesting talking point, but I guess the far right talking points are gaining traction on HN as well.
Not new in the slightest.
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.
People just want to drive irresponsibly and they will invent any reason to justify why they're the victim, actually.
There is no reason to insist this must be face to face thing.
It's quite a different story in other countries at least in terms of visibility!
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.
> 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
Anyone that doesn't care about the fine (perhaps in a stolen car) may still do it, but they'd do it regardless.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
And now you would never bother laying fiber to a speed camera when you can just put a SIM card in the thing.
Really? Or have you (or someone else) just divided the number of fines by the number of motorists?
https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/drivers-receiving...
I suspect the division method.
"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.
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".
cjs_ac•1h ago
> 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.