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Comment by martin_bech | Hacker News Reader

No its about following the rest of the traffic. In the unlimited sections, traffic is 130++ km/h (up to 200-250 in overtaking lane), So if you are slower, changing lanes, overtaking etc. becomes less safe.

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One thing I noticed last year when driving in France for the first time, compared to the UK was that there was a much greater difference in speed between the lanes. I imagine the difference would be even greater on the Autobahn. In the UK, the motorways have a speed limit of 70mph, and most people actually do it - very large vehicles are limited to 60mph. So emerging from the left lane to go around something slow only involves adding 10mph or so. In France, the right lane is often limited by a lorry going at 90km/h, while the left lane is at 130km/h. Emerging to go around something (if you have the misfortune of having to slow down behind the lorry because the left lane is busy) involves adding 40km/h to your speed before the next car in the left lane catches up, which involves a lot more power to do safely.

> In the UK, the motorways have a speed limit of 70mph, and most people actually do it

Are you kidding? Try doing 70mph in the third lane of a non-busy motorway and see how long it takes someone too be dangerously close behind you.

That's something different. Of course there are loads of people speeding too.

One other thing I notice is that different motorways in the UK have different characters. On some, yes people do tend to stick to the limit, and on others not so much. I haven't spotted a correlation yet with the locations of speed cameras.

You can just stay in the slow lane if that's a problem. And doing 130 km/h in the middle lane is perfectly acceptable, people can just overtake you by using the fast lane.

I've never had the problem OP mentions, on the Autobahn...

But you were talking about overtaking, that's a completely different scenario (keeping up with traffic on the slow lane).

You're saying that any combination of car and driver than can't sustain cruise speeds over 130Km/h is a danger.

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