Belgium is copying France's ban on powerful cars for young drivers, but its own numbers disagree
Belgium's mobility minister wants to study banning young drivers from powerful cars, following France and Italy. The country's own road safety institute says only 3 percent of serious crashes involving 18-24 year olds involve a car over 200 hp
Belgian Mobility Minister Jean-Luc Crucke has opened a debate on restricting young drivers from operating high-powered vehicles, asking his administration and the road safety institute Vias to study the idea before any legislation gets drafted. The move follows France, which approved a law in late July 2026 banning drivers from vehicles over 200 hp for their first three years on the road, and Italy, which has run a similar restriction since 2011. No power threshold or affected age range has been set for Belgium yet, since working that out is exactly what the requested study is meant to do.
Why Crucke is looking at this now
Crucke has been careful to frame this as an opening move rather than a decision. "I want to open the debate," he said, positioning the request to Vias and his own administration as genuine research rather than a policy already settled behind closed doors. That distinction matters given how directly France's own law arrived, approved in the wake of a string of serious accidents and with a firm 200 hp threshold already attached. Belgium, for now, has neither number.
The number that undercuts the entire premise
Vias's own data complicates the case before the study has even started. Only 3 percent of serious accidents involving drivers aged 18 to 24 involve a car producing more than 200 hp, compared with 6 percent across the entire driving population. In other words, young drivers are currently underrepresented, not overrepresented, in exactly the category of crash a horsepower cap is designed to prevent. Vias spokesperson Stef Willems used that figure to question the proposal directly, pointing instead to alcohol and drugs as factors that show up consistently in serious crashes regardless of how powerful the car is.
A 200 hp line means something different in an EV
France's and Italy's power caps were designed in a mostly combustion-engine era, when 200 hp reliably signalled a genuinely quick, enthusiast-oriented car. That is less true now. The Volkswagen ID.3, part of a lineup that recently passed two million EVs sold, has mainstream Pro Performance and Pro S trims both rated at 204 hp, and Renault's newly facelifted Megane E-Tech reaches 217 hp in its higher-output version, neither aimed at anyone chasing performance, just ordinary family hatchbacks. A flat horsepower threshold written with petrol cars in mind risks catching everyday electric commuter cars in the same net as an actual sports car, unless whoever eventually drafts Belgium's version accounts for that shift specifically.
Italy's real result, and why it might not repeat here
Mobility expert Dirk Lauwers points to Italy's 2011 restriction as the strongest evidence in favour of a power cap, crediting it with roughly a 25 percent reduction in accidents among young drivers. That is a genuinely significant number. It does not, however, settle whether the power cap itself did the work or whether it arrived bundled with other reforms in the same package, and Belgium's own Vias figures suggest the underlying risk pattern here may not match Italy's from a decade and a half ago closely enough to guarantee the same result.
The alternatives already on the table
Touring has argued the focus should sit on driver behaviour rather than vehicle type. VAB has proposed programmable car keys that cap a vehicle's top speed regardless of what sits under the bonnet. Others have floated reforming driver training around the graduated, tiered licensing model already used for motorcycles. Several stakeholders also point out that insurance premiums already price most young drivers out of genuinely powerful cars well before any law would need to.
AutoNext Take
Belgium commissioning an actual study before drafting a law is the right instinct, and it compares favourably to France, which moved almost straight to legislation after a string of accidents. But it is difficult to read Vias's own numbers, published by the very institute the minister has asked to study this, without concluding that a horsepower cap targets the wrong variable. Young drivers are already involved in high-power-car crashes at a lower rate than the general population, not a higher one. It would not be the first European road safety measure to outpace its own evidence either: AutoNext found a similar gap between intent and outcome in ROADPOL's twice-yearly Speedweek, where crash numbers dip only for as long as the enforcement campaign runs.
Italy's 25 percent drop is the single strongest piece of evidence that a power cap can work, but one before-and-after data point from 2011 does not automatically transfer to Belgium's roads, drivers, and enforcement culture in 2026, especially once you account for how many ordinary electric cars now sit above a threshold that used to mean something specific. If Crucke's study takes ideas like VAB's programmable keys or graduated licensing seriously as alternatives, and adjusts for what 200 hp actually means in an EV, this could turn into one of the more genuinely evidence-led road safety reforms in Europe. If it does not, and Belgium legislates a power cap anyway simply because its neighbours already have, that is adopting a policy without first checking whether it solves the problem it actually has, or which cars it will actually end up restricting.
