Would you trust it with your licence?
A BBC TV local news programme has found there's reason to doubt the accuracy of the Gatso, the workhorse of the Government's speed camera scheme.
"Look East" revealed on Friday that Gatso speed camera calibration procedures raise an anomaly that casts doubt on the evidence from around half of the devices. About half the Gatsos sent off for routine calibration had to be repaired before the calibration process was completed.
This suggests that around half the cameras became faulty at some point during the year before calibration. As road safety campaign Safe Speed pointed out, without knowing when the faults first appeared, any camera affected can't be relied on to provide accurate evidence in court.
This came to light when Sally Chidzoy of BBC TV Look East obtained camera calibration invoices under the Freedom of Information Act. The invoices so far obtained apply to Essex and Hertfordshire cameras. It's likely that a similar situation applies to all Gatso cameras in every area.
Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign said: "Nothing about the incompetence of speed camera operations surprises me any more, but this particular blunder is certainly of epic proportions.
"This information casts very substantial doubts on the safety of evidence from thousands of cameras used against hundreds of thousands of motorists.
"Confidence in speed cameras is already at rock bottom, but this information will drive it down further. I can only imagine that hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of motorists are going to be asking for their money back."
Tom Magner, a forensic engineer specialising in speed cameras told the BBC that the odds were stacked against the motorist, and that Gatsos should be calibrated more frequently.
"It's a precision piece of equipment and there's a very tight tolerance on which it is operated in order to be accurate," he said. "So when you're dealing with the sort of speeds you deal with in these particular cases, it's asking a lot of that equipment to operate time and time and time again so accurately.
"I don't think one annual calibration is sufficient. I think every six months at least but every time the camera is used, it should be checked to make sure that it is working properly."