To your first point, that's what adaptive cruise control does. It will slow you down to maintain a gap with the car in front of you.
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly. I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...