We expect navigation apps to warn us about gridlock, give us the best routes, and tell us how long our drives will be. But Waze is rolling out a new speed-limits feature that, while useful, might come off as a pain at first.
The crowdsourced traffic app now includes limits information for thousands of roads, and it will tell you when you’re breaking the law.
Waze‘s new function isn’t available everywhere yet; it’s currently available in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad, Tobago, and Uruguay, the developer said in a blog post today. But the rest of the world is “coming soon.”
The new notifications appear in the on-screen speedometer. When you exceed the speed limit, a bubble will show up in the corner to remind you of how fast you should be going. And you can even customize it to not appear until you’ve crossed a certain overage like 5, or 10 miles (or kilometers, presumably) per hour. Or if you’re a true speed demon, you can set it to let you know when you’re going 15 percent over. Although at that point, we’re not sure you even care what the speed limit is.
Waze says it has a community of over 360,000 users who have spent the past couple of months logging and submitting speed-limit information. They also contribute by submitting information about police traps, accidents, and other road conditions.
Evan Killham is a freelance writer who lives in Nebraska and isn’t interested in football, so he has plenty of time to play and think about video games. He has written for Bitmob and GamesBeat and sometimes, he even goes outside. But not too often because he’s heard there are bees out there. Occasionally, companies send free units for review. Evan subscribes to Cult of Mac’s Reviews Policy and also does not keep the items he receives for possible coverage.
7 responses to “Waze will now nag you about how fast you’re driving”
1st
Actually, this won’t annoy me. It will be nice to see what the actual speed limit is in areas where it is not posted. What DOES annoy me is the damn pop-up requiring you to select “Passenger” every 1st time you go to type something in. Something to prevent an accident/distracted driver practically CAUSES them by pulling your attention away from the road even longer to select a button to continue.
great photo
Although I love Waze one of the things that quite annoys me about it is that you do not have the ability to disable many features. This would be one I would put on the list of needing to have a disable feature. Another would be to ignore certain reports such as “vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead” . It gets kinda old hearing it blurt out this warning every 3 minutes when you are going down the highway for a considerable amount of time.
True but if “vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead” ends up sticking his tail out, you’ll crash into them and not know they were there. Just as “Vehicle stopped on road ahead” which many do instead of getting off onto the shoulder.
Or you could, you know, pay attention to the road and see the vehicle sticking its tail out, instead of using Waze to report a few pebbles on the road for 6 points each
TomTom beat them by 10 years.