Autobahn speed limits? Germany says nein, danke

The most famous bastion of legal speed is safe for another day, after Germany’s parliament rejected plans to enact a blanket 130km/h (80mph) speed limit on its 8,000-odd miles of Autobahn.

Nearly 80 per cent of the Bundestag (Parliament) voted against the proposal, which had already been dismissed by German Transport Minister, Andreas Scheuer, in January 2019.

The plan, introduced by Germany’s Green Party, mirrors a proposal from the German Federal Environment Agency in 2006, which suggested a blanket speed limit of 120km/h (about 74.5mph).

Both the 2006 and 2019 plan sought to deal with Germany’s transportation pollution, which hasn’t dropped since 1990. This is despite a target to reduce emissions to 60 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020, and in spite of tightening emissions restrictions since 1992 – when ‘Euro 1’ legislation mandated catalytic converters and unleaded petrol. Since then, through five major revisions and countless smaller updates, the Euro legislation has held manufacturers to increasingly stringent standards, yet transport pollution in Germany has increased.

So that left Germany’s policymakers with a bit of a conundrum – what else to do to reduce emissions, meet their country's 2020 pollution target and not face punitive EU fines for Germany’s CO2 emissions. And that’s why the German government commissioned the ‘National Platform on the Future of Mobility’ to come up with ways to lower emissions.

Draft plans were leaked earlier this year, which prompted German Transport Minister, Andreas Scheuer, to say that one part of the proposal – the 80mph speed limit – “goes against all common sense”.