Speed doesn’t kill, says Benz

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Speed doesn’t kill, says Benz
RICHARD BLACKBURN
March 5, 2010



Safety expert for Mercedes says strict speeding laws are not the answer to lowering road tolls.

A leading safety expert says a crackdown on speeding is not the answer to reducing the road toll.

The vice president of safety development for Mercedes-Benz, Ulrich Mellinghoff, says crash avoidance systems, better roads and more roundabouts would do more to cut the road toll than tougher speeding laws.

The approach is in direct contrast to state governments in NSW and Victoria, who have been preaching the "speed kills" mantra as the number one panacea for the road toll.

Mr Mellinghoff says motorists often fell into the trap of thinking they were driving safely because they were doing less than the speed limit.

He says the German road toll had reduced significantly in the past 20 years, despite much higher speeds on the roads.

" In Germany you can drive as fast as you want. I don't think that speed alone is the problem. It's the wrong speed in a special situation. With speed limits you will not stop those situations. If you have fog and drive at 100km/h, which is allowed, you are really in high danger of having an accident. On the other hand, if you drive 250km/h on the German autobahn in clear weather conditions with no traffic, it's not really a risk and no accidents happen in those situations," he says.

His claims are borne out by German road statistics. In 1972, there were 20,000 deaths on West German roads. In 2009, there were 4100, despite 20 million more people on the road (including the old East Germany).

"That was with much worse traffic and significantly more vehicles on the road," says Mellinghoff.

"What we have seen is there are a lot of very different reasons for accidents. Sometimes it is not the high speed, it is the wrong speed. If you limit the speed, the driver often thinks all they have to do is drive the speed limit and they don't have to think," he says.

It was better to put the responsibility for driving at the right speed on the shoulders of the individual driver.

Accident avoidance technology, including pedestrian avoidance systems, also had the potential to drastically reduce the road toll.

When stability control was introduced on all cars in Germany, there was a 30 per cent reduction in accidents where a single car leaves the road.

He says Australia's New Car Assessment Program, which crash tests cars and awards safety ratings, should reward vehicles more for crash avoidance, rather than the protection they offered in a crash.

"They should focus more on these assistance systems. It makes more sense to avoid an accident than to reduce the severity of it," he says.

Mercedes was working on a variety of advanced systems designed to cut the road toll, including infra-red systems that detect pedestrians at the side of the road in the dark and spotlight them to alert the driver.

The company also had brake assistance technology that intervened to provide maximum braking force in an emergency situation.

He says the assistance, which occurs in the last 100 milliseconds before a crash, can reduce impact speeds by 5 to 6km/h.

He says Germany has seen good results from increasing the number of roundabouts, as they reduce the number of severe accidents at intersections, while better separating vehicles from cyclists and pedestrians also helps to keep the toll down.

He believes car to car communication can also play a big role in reducing the toll, with cars able to warn drivers behind them about hazardous road conditions including ice on the road or accidents ahead.

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