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    Newsom Vetoes Bill Requiring Cars to Warn Speeding Drivers

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    The legislation would have made California the first state in the nation to require intelligent speed assistance technology in vehicles.Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday vetoed California legislation that would have mandated that all new cars in the state have a system that alerts drivers when they exceed the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour.Speeding is a factor in nearly one-third of traffic fatalities in the United States, and the legislation’s supporters said they wanted to curb rising roadway deaths by making California the first state in the nation to require the technology.The state has a long history of adopting vehicle requirements, particularly on emissions, that have spurred automakers to adopt changes across their national fleet. Backers hoped that the California speed sensor law would have similarly forced changes that would have had an impact beyond the state.Intelligent speed assistance systems have been widely used in Europe for years, and they became mandatory in July in all new cars sold in the European Union. They are similar to other driver assistance technologies that, for example, notify drivers if a car is their blind spot or if their vehicle is drifting into another lane.Research in Europe has found that speed-warning systems reduce average driving speed, speed variability and the proportion of time that a driver exceeds the speed limit, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has urged the federal government to require the technology in the United States.The California bill would have mandated that, beginning with model year 2030, all new passenger vehicles, trucks and buses in California would have to include technology that emits visual and audio signals that notify drivers when they have exceeded the posted speed limit. Emergency vehicles and motorcycles would have been exempt, as would vehicles without GPS or a front-facing camera.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Assessing JD Vance’s Appeals to the Middle Class on the Campaign Trail

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      The Republican vice-presidential nominee has assailed Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions with inaccurate claims.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who rose to fame detailing his Appalachian roots in a best-selling memoir, has made appeals to working-class and middle-class voters a core tenet of his campaign messaging.In rallies and interviews, Mr. Vance has sought to portray the Republican ticket as a champion of everyday people, first-time home buyers and autoworkers by misleadingly describing Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions on housing, trade and manufacturing.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What Was Said“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”— in a local news interview in AugustThis is exaggerated. Economists and real estate experts say that while migration, including illegal immigration, has contributed to population growth and thus demand for housing, it is not a main driver of the country’s housing affordability crisis. A lack of supply is the primary culprit, they said.Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Mr. Vance’s claim “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.”After the Great Recession, the number of new homes built annually plummeted and never really recovered in the two decades that followed. As a result, researchers and real estate firms now estimate a nationwide shortage of 1.5 million to seven million housing units.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      All New U.S. Cars Must Carry Automatic Brakes by 2029

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      The technology is already sold on most vehicles, but a new federal safety regulation raises the standards. Starting in 2029, a new federal safety regulation will require all new cars and trucks in the United States to be sold with automatic emergency braking — sensors that hit the brakes to avoid a collision if the driver does not.The new rule, which was made final on Monday, imposes more stringent requirements than the automatic emergency braking technology now sold on most vehicles, and even goes past the point of present technological feasibility, automakers said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set a September 2029 date for compliance, saying it was confident that the systems would be ready by then.Under the standards, outlined in a 317-page document, all “light vehicles,” which include cars, large pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, will have to be able to automatically hit their brakes to avoid hitting another vehicle at speeds of up to 62 miles per hour. The system will also have to at least begin to apply the brakes at speeds up to 90 m.p.h. if a collision is imminent. That’s higher than the maximum U.S. speed limit of 85 m.p.h. The system will have to detect pedestrians, too.The new rule is meant to address the steady climb of traffic deaths in recent years, according to officials.NHTSAThe rules are necessary because of steadily climbing traffic deaths in recent years, Biden administration officials argued. “The new vehicle safety standards we finalized today will save hundreds of lives and prevent tens of thousands of injuries every year,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.An estimated 41,000 people were killed in automobile accidents in the United States in 2023.Automatic braking systems are a relatively new feature, and regulators and carmakers alike agree that they have already helped save lives. Introduced in 2011, they typically use cameras, radar or both to identify other vehicles, pedestrians or obstacles in front of a car.They usually alert the driver if a collision is possible, then force the application of the brakes if needed.Carmakers have said they needed no prodding to adopt the systems, pointing out that, in 2016, they voluntarily agreed to make the technology standard in all new cars and trucks. About 90 percent of new vehicles on sale now have some form of automatic emergency braking.Regulators said on Monday that carmakers had expressed concern about “taking away the driver’s authority” at high speeds.The industry’s main lobbying group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, “viewed the expectation that manufacturers are capable of providing undefined levels of avoidance at all speeds as neither practicable nor reasonable,” regulators said.The Biden administration estimated the rule’s cost at an average of $23 per vehicle. More