CEO of Fiat Olivier François he told the Autocar portal that he would rather limit the maximum speed of his company’s city cars to 120 km/h, instead of installing in them the expensive safety technologies that the European Union prescribes. Namely, he considers certain systems unnecessary for driving at low speeds. That’s how he describes most of the ADAS technologies mandated by current EU regulations, saying they are designed to improve safety at higher speeds.
Limitation to lower prices
As an alternative to the installation of these systems, for cars such as the Fiat 500, Panda and Grande Panda, which are mainly driven around town, he therefore proposes a maximum speed limit. Namely, none of the mentioned models can officially exceed 160 km/h, and the Grande Panda EV is limited to 132 km/h. “It’s hard for me to understand why we have to install all this super-expensive hardware: sensors, cameras, traffic sign recognition… It’s all a bit inadequate, a bit crazy, and it’s contributed to raising the average price of a city car by 60% in the last five or six years,” said François.
At the same time, he welcomes the EU’s proposals for a new M1E category for small cars, which shows that legislators understand that uniformly imposed safety rules are not appropriate in all vehicle segments. The new category will cover electric vehicles up to 4.2 meters in length, and the European Commission plans to freeze the technical requirements for that category for 10 years.
Speeding is illegal anyway
“I don’t think city cars were particularly dangerous in 2018 or 2019. Our proposal was literally to say ‘let’s go back a bit from overloading cars with expensive hardware’,” François pointed out, stressing that speed on European roads is limited to a maximum of 120 or 130 km/h anyway, so driving faster than that is illegal anyway.