CNN recent­ly report­ed on air, in a clip shown above but also picked up wide­ly by local news around the coun­try, that the Nation­al Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Board recent­ly announced a rec­om­men­da­tion to require automak­ers to lim­it the speed of cars. 

“The NTSB is call­ing on the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to start incen­tiviz­ing car­mak­ers to put smart speed lim­iter sys­tems in new cars,” accord­ing to an arti­cle by Pete Muntean shar­ing the report. Speed lim­iters work by cross ref­er­enc­ing local speed lim­its and a car’s GPS posi­tion, explains Muntean. Speed lim­it­ing tech­nol­o­gy is rec­og­nized for its poten­tial to ben­e­fit traf­fic safe­ty if applied to cars. So far, the tech­nol­o­gy has only been applied at scale to elec­tric scoot­er rental com­pa­nies, how­ev­er.

Erin Mar­quis, writ­ing for Jalop­nik, respond­ed to the CNN report with a high­ly crit­i­cal response to the tele­vi­sion’s fram­ing of the news, describ­ing the video shown above as ” sur­pris­ing­ly and com­plete­ly dis­hon­est­ly report­ed.” 

Lis­ten, I get it: Who does­n’t like a snap­py head­line that clicks well? A premise that will get folks active in the com­ments and lead them to hit­ting those all-impor­tant like and sub­scribe but­tons. But what NTSB actu­al­ly did was rec­om­mend a timetable to put togeth­er incen­tives for automak­ers that put speed lim­iters in new cars. Not sure how you get from that to “Our cars are in dan­ger of being mon­i­tored and con­trolled by the gov­ern­ment!” Even CNN admits, this “lim­i­ta­tion” could come in the form of an audi­ble or visu­al warning—a fea­ture already famil­iar to any­one with a new­er vehi­cle.

Mar­quis notes that NTS­B’s sug­ges­tion isn’t even the most aggres­sive of the options. Intel­li­gent Speed Assis­tance, like already required on new cars in Europe, is the oth­er option. “Sev­er­al Amer­i­can automak­ers, like Ford and Jeep, got a head-start and have been installing the tech in Euro­pean mod­els for years. A new pilot pro­gram in New York City put ISAs in 50 gov­ern­ment fleet vehi­cles — the first city in the nation to do so,” explains Mar­quis.