- The Fiat CEO said he would be happy to limit the top speed of city cars to 73 mph (118 km/h).
- Olivier Francois thinks that speed limiters could be a low-cost alternative to fitting more ADAS.
- The Fiat 500, Pandina, and Grande Panda are mostly used at low speeds within the city.
Fiat’s urban dwellers, like the 500 and the Panda, are not known for their speed, but they could soon become even slower on purpose. According to Fiat CEO Olivier Francois, limiting top speed could be a way to satisfy EU safety regulations without having to fit their budget models with expensive ADAS.
Francois spoke to Autocar about his intentions: “I would happily limit my city cars, my smaller cars, to what is today the maximum legal speed limit. It’s already a limitation. There is something weird that I need to over-spec my cars to go above the legal speed limit.”
Review: New Fiat Grande Panda Hybrid Makes Budget Look Cool Again
The CEO said that the average legal maximum speed in Europe is 73 mph (118 km/h), adding that most of the safety equipment “has been developed for cars to go way above the speed limit.”
On the contrary, Fiat’s most popular models, including the 500, Panda, and Grande Panda, are mostly used at low speeds within urban environments. Francois doesn’t believe that capping their top speed at 73 mph (118 km/h) would have a serious impact, as none of the aforementioned city cars is particularly fast in the first place.
More specifically, the electric Grande Panda is already restricted to 82 mph (132 km/h) to preserve range, while the ICE and hybrid variants of the subcompact hatchback can go up to 99 mph (160 km/h).
The Fiat 500e has a limiter at 84 mph (135 km/h) or 93 mph (150 km/h), depending on battery size. As for the new 500 Hybrid, it can theoretically reach 93 mph (150 km/h), but judging from the acceleration figures, that would require lots of patience.
Slower Means Safer
Francois thinks that a new speed limiter could serve as a cheaper alternative to more sophisticated ADAS that would inevitably increase the price of the models with little or no benefit to the customer. He also welcomed the proposal for a new small car category in Europe that could be free of the strict safety rules applicable in higher segments.
More: EU Quietly Plans New Car Class That Could See Prices Drop To €15,000
“I have a hard time understanding why we need to install all this super-expensive hardware: sensors, cameras, road sign recognition… All this is a little bit inadequate, a bit crazy, and has contributed to raising the average price of a city car by 60% over the last five or six years. I don’t think that city cars in 2018 or 2019 were extremely dangerous. Our proposal was literally to say ‘let’s go a little bit backward from overloading cars with expensive hardware’.”
“We fundamentally think that with all these rules, the most unsustainable portion lies in the city cars and urban driving, because all these cars are small, democratic and inexpensive, bought by younger people and so on for the daily commute in a city. They are driven at way slower speeds. It’s not the same usage.”
If Fiat imposes new speed restrictions across its lineup, it won’t be the first automaker to do so. Volvo, Renault, and Dacia models already have a limited top speed of 112 mph (180 km/h), designed to reduce the likelihood of serious accidents.
