There is no need to harden the traffic norms to bring down fatalities due to accidents, said Mercedes-Benz India Managing Director & CEO Martin Schwenk, adding that it should be imperative to implement those rules properly.
The conversation on road safety issues emerged in the public domain after former Tata Sons Chairman Cyrus Mistry lost his life due to a car accident. He was traveling from a Mercedes-Benz vehicle.
“If everyone would behave as per the regulation, we would already have a significant reduction in road fatalities, and that’s for a two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and four-wheeler,” Schwenk told PTI on the sidelines of the SIAM annual session.
Taking note of the increasing number of road accidents in India, he said “The gap is not so much in the regulation part. It’s in the behavioral and in the enforcement of existing regulations, which both could significantly reduce the road fatalities in all modes of transportation to get down from the 1.5 lakh annual deaths on the Indian roads”
He added, “Behave as per the codes and enforce the codes.”
On the safety standards of the company’s vehicle, he said, “Mercedes Benz has excelled not only on the product side but also engaged a lot in creating the safest vehicle and I will still say, we are at the forefront of safety on vehicles.”
Schwenk continued, “We are known for having superior safety standards and all of our cars, for example, all of them have at least six airbags, some of them seven, nine and the Maybach has 13 airbags… we have all five star tested (for crash) vehicles.”
The discussion on road accidents found its space in the mainstream lately after the Shapoorji Pallonji scion and Jahangir Pandole died in a car accident.
For the unversed, Mistry (54) and his friend Jahangir Pandole were killed in a fatal accident on September 4, when their car hit a road divider in Palghar. The driver Anahita Pandole (55), and her husband Darius Pandole (60), who were sitting at the front, had suffered serious injuries. Both were admitted to Shri H N Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre in Mumbai.
Palghar SP Balasaheb Patil confirmed that police received an interim report from Mercedes on the crash late Wednesday. He said the report sent by Mercedes stated that the vehicle was “being driven at a speed of 100 kmph, and Dr. Anahita Pandole applied brakes five seconds before the accident. When the crash took place, the vehicle was traveling at a speed of 89 kmph.”