It can cost anything up to £50,000 for a new speed camera installation. A major part of that cost is the miles of underground wiring that supports the camera.

With this in mind, the Abu Dhabi Department of Transport looked up at the sky one day and thought, hey, we've got a lot of sun here in the desert, why do we need wires when we've got solar energy? Enter the solar powered speed camera.

With guaranteed sunshine throughout the year, Abu Dhabi stands to save a lot of money on installations and make a lot of money in fines.

Stretches of the 327km desert road linking the UAE and Saudi Arabia had once been impossible to monitor because of the lack of electricity.

The National reports today that the first of these cameras have been installed and the road will now be policed by a series of solar-powered devices that transmit information about violations to a central processing centre.

The UAE-Saudi link is renowned as a speeder's paradise, especially with the large proportion of high speed super-cars owned in that area of the World.

Comments Posted by mike170469 on Fri Mar 20, 2009 9:41 pm News Team Wrote: Enter the solar powered speed camera. Do you mean we are Happy for Rainy Britain would you need to do a new section in the speed camera update for this Solar Camera's what would the BMP pic be a speed camera with shades on would you be able to say the sun blinded as a reson for speeding WAZE app GARMIN NUVI 465T (Truck) CN EUROPE NT 2014.10 Citeron C8 in car Navteq 2011/12   Posted by turbo10 on Sat Mar 21, 2009 12:55 pm They should adopt the same idea here, then the camera would only work on 1, maybe 2 days a year Triumph Tiger 800 XRt Garmin Zumo 595LM TomTom Live Truck Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge   Posted by gem on Sat Mar 21, 2009 6:22 pm Now I don't often name drop but I am just back from Abu Dhabi and the stretch of road between there and Dubai has quite a few cameras. However surely the worst misdemeanour must be driving 1 metre from our boot, both cars travelling at 130kph, overtaking slower cars, and acting aggressively with flashing lights etc etc because you happen to have a range rover or some 4x4. The fact a handful of other cars were equally in front ouf us travelling at the same speed was ignored. it would be interesting to se if the 3 fatalities (average per day) and the serious "accidents" were caused by aggressiveness.   Posted by snark on Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:15 pm So all it takes to disable them is to paint the solar cells with black paint! The greatest prison is the human mind   Posted by Darren on Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:55 pm snark Wrote: So all it takes to disable them is to paint the solar cells with black paint! I don't think anyone would want to risk falling foul of the UAE Police! Darren Griffin   Posted by MrGumby on Fri Mar 27, 2009 9:33 am gem Wrote: Now I don't often name drop but I am just back from Abu Dhabi and the stretch of road between there and Dubai has quite a few cameras. However surely the worst misdemeanour must be driving 1 metre from our boot, both cars travelling at 130kph, overtaking slower cars, and acting aggressively with flashing lights etc etc because you happen to have a range rover or some 4x4. The fact a handful of other cars were equally in front ouf us travelling at the same speed was ignored. it would be interesting to se if the 3 fatalities (average per day) and the serious "accidents" were caused by aggressiveness. Having lived there for several years and driven that highway many times, I completely agree. Standards of driving by the locals are appalling, not helped by the fact that many of them are above the law. At least they've now removed the speed bumps (yes, really - speed bumps, big ones, on a 140kph road!). A colleague of mine was written off when he slowed for a speed bump and the truck behind him didn't.