With one in every six Americans on the receiving end of at least one speeding ticket at some point in their lives, it comes as no surprise that the fines that go along with those tickets can sometimes be pretty heavy. Lucky for those in the United States, the record for the highest speeding ticket fine actually belongs to a Swedish man who was driving his expensive supercar in Switzerland at the time.
Despite Europe having the famous German Autobahn, a road with no speed limit, that doesn’t mean other parts of the continent don’t levy some hefty fines for breaking rules. Rather than following a fixed set of fines for speeders, Switzerland has no upper cap on fines for speeding. They have a unique system for calculating fines that resulted in one man setting a new world record for the largest speeding fine at just over $1 million.
Let's take a closer look at the circumstances of this $1 million speeding ticket!
Fines In Switzerland
Although many countries in the world have set upper limits on their speeding fines based on the amount over the limit that the accused was going, there are some exceptions to this rule. Many countries in Europe have instituted policies that take into account the assets of the driver as well as the speed over the limit that the driver was going.
Switzerland, for example, has a unique system for determining the amount that a driver will be fined for speeding. Under Swiss law, the level of the fine corresponds with the wealth of the driver and to the speed recorded concurrently. This means that there is no cap on the amount that a person can be ticketed.
Proponents of this method of assessing fines say that this system is fairer and incentivizes the rich to uphold the law as well as those who would be hit harder by the bracketed system used in many other places. For those with excess wealth, a fine of a couple of hundred dollars is not likely to deter them from breaking laws, and they may even see the fine as a “convenience fee” to allow them to go as fast as they choose with no regard for public safety.
The Speeder
The previous record for the highest assessed speeding ticket was given (again, in Sweden) to a millionaire who was caught going 85 MPH through a 35 MPH residential zone. His $22.7 million net worth, combined with the fact that this was not his first offense, landed him with a $290,000 ticket. He was driving a red Ferrari and admitted that he had a hard time controlling his speed in the powerful car.
Additionally, another record for potential monetary ramifications not directly resulting from a speeding ticket fine is held by a man in Rotterdam whose 20-year-old son decided to speed at a rate of 100 MPH in a 55 MPH zone in his dad’s $2.4 million Bugatti Veyron. After the young man was ticketed, the extremely expensive car was seized as punishment, resulting in an enormous monetary ramification.
The new record holder, as of January of 2010, for fines from a speeding ticket, is an unnamed Swedish driver who was going over 180 MPH in an area marked with a limit of just 72 MPH. The 37-year-old man was not only fined an astonishing 650,000 euros (about $1 million) but also had his $200,000 Mercedes SLS AMG impounded.
According to police reports of the incident, the man took over half a kilometer (or just over a quarter mile) to safely bring his car to a stop. He was caught initially by a speed camera on the A12 highway, which links Bern and Lausanne. The police caught up with him later when he stopped at a rest stop nearby after being tailed by the police.
The driver was picking up his new car from Germany and traveling back home at the time. Interestingly, the only reason that the man was clocked at the full 180 MPH was that a newer radar had been installed on the road recently. He had missed having a fully accurate reading by prior cameras on the road because they were of an older generation and could only clock speeds up to around 125 MPH.
Once the police caught up to the man, he was released after questioning. During the inquiry, the man told the police that he believed his speedometer was “faulty” and that it had been the cause of his excessive speed. The highest possible fine that could have been handed down, in this case, was impoundment fees as well as 300 days of fines at around a whopping $4,000 a day.
Not only did the man receive the most expensive speeding ticket ever recorded to date, but he also takes the “prize” for fastest recorded traveling in the country. According to a police spokesman who interviewed with the DailyMail UK, they have “no record of anyone being caught travelling faster in the country.”