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Renault boss Luca de Meo at the presentation of an electric car: in future no faster than 180 km / h
Photo: BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS
The French car maker Renault wants to limit the speed of its new cars to 180 kilometers per hour to prevent traffic accidents.
Excessive speed is the reason for a third of fatal car accidents, said Renault boss Luca de Meo on Friday at his company's general shareholders meeting in Paris.
Therefore, the models from Renault and Dacia should not drive faster than 180 km / h in the future.
The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo had already introduced such a limit in 2020.
According to De Meo, Renault wants to equip all of its vehicles with an automatic speed control system called a safety coach anyway.
This adjusts the speed according to the local speed limits and also takes into account conditions such as dangerous curves, the weather or the driver's attention.
De Meo also announced that his group wanted to become CO2 neutral ten years earlier than previously planned.
In Europe this climate protection target is to be achieved by 2040, in the rest of the world by 2050. By 2030, 90 percent of the cars built by Renault are to have an electric or hybrid drive.
Speed limit at Volvo
The Swedish automaker Volvo has already taken the step of a voluntary speed limit.
In the spring of 2019, Volvo board member Håkan Samuelsson announced that the Swedes' new cars should drive a maximum of 180 kilometers per hour from 2020 - to reduce the number of fatal accidents to zero.
"A speed limit is not a panacea, but it is worth it if it can save even a human life," said Samuelsson.
The problem at high speeds is that the safety technology in the vehicle is no longer sufficient to prevent serious injuries and fatalities in an accident.
That is why the group decided to take this step.
Do speed limits work?
That's what scientists say
So far, there has been little research into how effectively a speed limit would prevent the number of serious accidents.
In Brandenburg, a speed limit of 130 km / h was introduced in 2002 on a 62-kilometer section of the A24 between the two motorway triangles Wittstock / Dosse and Havelland.
The effects were analyzed by scientists for a study: The number of accidents has halved from 654 accidents in three years without a speed limit to 337 accidents in three years at 130 km / h.
The development of the number of injuries is particularly noteworthy: Between 1996 and 2002, 1,850 people were injured in accidents on this section of the motorway - in the same period after the introduction of 130 km / h, the number fell by more than half, to 799 injuries.
There is a similar example in North Rhine-Westphalia on a section of the A4 motorway between the communities of Elsdorf and Merzenich.
In 2017, after several serious accidents with numerous injuries and a total of nine fatalities in the previous three years, a speed limit of 130 kilometers per hour was introduced.
In the following years, reported the German Road Safety Council (DVR), no more fatal accidents occurred there.
oka / AFP
