When Congress passed the income tax in 1913, they promised it would only touch the wealthiest Americans.
Virginia is running the same play with GPS speed limiters – start with the worst offenders on the road.
Blue states have already written what comes next and it has nothing to do with speeders.
Virginia's New Speed Limiter Law Records Your Location and Has No Plan to Delete It
Virginia's Intelligent Speed Assistance program launched in July, targeting drivers convicted of going over 100 MPH.
About 100 Virginians have been forced to install the devices so far – and the state is keeping every piece of data they generate.
The device tracks where you are, which direction you are heading, and exactly how fast you are going – continuously, in real time, every mile you drive.
Virginia's new law requires no deletion of any of it – proposed regulations introduced in October require only that the data stay confidential, not that anyone ever erase it.
You pay $100 to install it, then $180 every month to keep it running, with enrollment lasting anywhere from 60 days to six months.
The state calls this punishment.
Critics raised the same concern when Flock Safety deployed thousands of cameras and license plate readers for law enforcement across the country.
The government is assembling overlapping layers of vehicle tracking and calling each one a targeted safety measure.
The technology is already malfunctioning – one driver was hard-capped at 35 MPH on the interstate when the device mistook a nearby road for his current location.
The state has a name for it: GPS drift.
California Already Voted to Install Speed Limiters on Every Car You Own
California state Sen. Scott Wiener, Democrat from San Francisco, introduced SB 961 – a bill requiring GPS speed limiters on every new passenger vehicle, truck, and bus sold in California starting with the 2027 model year.
The California Legislature passed it – both houses approved it.
Gavin Newsom vetoed it in October 2024, citing federal jurisdiction conflicts, but the technology itself was never his objection.
California is now moving a new version modeled on Virginia's super speeder framework.
Because California sets vehicle standards that more than a dozen other states follow, a California mandate becomes a de facto national standard for every automaker in the country.
Washington DC enacted the country's first Intelligent Speed Assistance law in October 2025. New York and Washington State have since enacted ISA-like programs of their own.
Maryland has a Super Speeder law set for full implementation by 2027. Arizona, Vermont, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Connecticut, and Illinois are all considering ISA legislation right now.
Republican lawmakers introduced the DRIVE Act to block federal agencies from imposing speed-limiter mandates.
Drivers install the device as a condition of keeping their license – which means the state never needed a warrant for a single byte of your location data, because you handed it over the moment you agreed to the program.
The European Union mandated GPS speed limiters on every new car sold in Europe starting July 2024.
They listed the reasons in the regulation itself: protecting Europeans from traffic accidents, poor air quality, and climate change.
Speed limiters have always been a climate policy.
The income tax started at 1% on incomes above $3,000 – roughly $90,000 in today's dollars – and within five years Congress had raised the top rate to 77%, because once the mechanism was in place, expanding it was just paperwork.
Virginia's 100 installed devices give state officials something they could never get through a direct mandate: real-world data, established vendor relationships, and a legal framework no one has challenged in court – and more than a dozen states are already building their own version of the same infrastructure.
The men running Virginia's program will tell you this is about keeping dangerous drivers off the road, and some of them believe it.
But the European version of this exact program put the real reason in writing: your car is an emissions compliance tool, your location is government property, and GPS drift on the interstate is just a known issue.
The income tax was supposed to stop at the wealthiest Americans too.
Sources:
- Pete Peterson, "Virginia Makes 'Super Speeders' Install GPS-Powered Speed-Limiters. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?," The Daily Caller, November 3, 2026.
- "Multiple US States Are Considering Mandating Speed-Limiting Devices – Here's How They Work," BGR, 2026.
- "California Gov. Vetoes Bill Requiring Speed Assistance in Vehicles," Repairer Driven News, October 2024.
- European Commission, General Vehicle Safety Regulation (EU) 2019/2144.
