Benefits of speed limiter to Mauritian motorists

Speed limiter is a device which prevent a vehicle to exceed a specified speed.

It has been demonstrated that lower speed variance leads to fewer crashes. As such, speed limits help to decrease crashes, accidents and body injuries.

Therefore, the use of speed limiter is important as speed itself is a key risk factor in road traffic injuries. Hence, speed influences both the risk of a road crash as well as the seriousness of the injuries that result from accidents.

Some of the social-economic benefits of speed limiter are :

1. Lower speed results in less fuel consumption by vehicles.
2. Lower speed also cuts down vehicle maintenance cost and slows down depreciation value thus vehicle last longer.
3. It will have a positive impact on the individual driving behavior.
4. It will reduce the speed of vehicle to the specific limit. Thus, it minimizes overall crash risk and its severity.
5. In this way, it will produce good monitoring mechanism for vehicle owners’/fleet operators.
6. It will help to eliminate losses related to speed crashes. These losses are mostly in vehicles loss, damage to roads and road infrastructure, house, goods etc.
7. Also, this will reduce the number of deaths among youngsters.
8. Therefore, with speed limiter, you can drive calmly and it enables lower insurance premium as consequence of fewer crashes.

Speed kills and one of the most careful ways to prevent thousands of crashes on our highways is to slow all vehicles down, including large trucks.

A study was carried out to identify the safety impacts of speed limiters in commercial truck fleets. The primary safety analysis focused on the reduction in truck crashes. These crashes could have been avoided or mitigated if there was an active speed limiter on the truck. Actually, this study was the first to use real truck crash data collected directly from commercial truck fleets. It showed a great number of crashes. The investigation included information from 20 business truck fleets. It included approximately 138,000 truck-years and more than 15,000 truck crashes and they operated under real-world, revenue-producing deliveries.

Eventually, the findings showed strong positive benefits for speed limiters. Results indicated that trucks without speed limiters had a significantly higher speed limiter-relevant accident rate (approximately 200%) compared to trucks with speed limiters.