Whoever stands out in road traffic in Switzerland should better be poor, as a lawyer with a primal trust in sports brakes recently learned.
What did he do to receive such a penalty? According to a court ruling, a lawyer and driver of a BMW 540d is to pay around 100,000 euros plus court costs (5,000 euros) and a kind of educational fee of 10,000 euros for tailgating on a Swiss motorway.
In March 2023, the 58-year-old came very close to the car in front of him in the overtaking lane. Close tailgating in this case means: there were only eight meters between the two vehicles, as the police established via camera – and all this at 110 to 120 kilometers per hour.
He drastically disregarded the mandatory safety distance, and according to the public prosecutor’s office, there was a high abstract risk of an accident
. The Aargauer Zeitung reports on this.
Those who like to press the gas pedal should prefer to do so in video games like Cyberpunk 2077:
The penalty must hurt
Why is the fine so high? In Switzerland, the principle is: the penalty must be proportional to the income in such cases. And since, according to the district court, the lawyer has an annual income of 1.8 million euros, daily rates between 30 euros and about 3000 euros were possible. Ultimately, it resulted in 50 times 2000 euros, totaling 100,000 euros.
Does the lawyer still have an option? The millionaire and self-proclaimed BMW fan can appeal the verdict to the Federal Court. The penalty currently hanging over him already came from the second instance, the competent higher court for the region.
This confirmed the penalty order of the district court and only reduced the “connection fine” – the aforementioned educational fee – from about 15,000 to 10,000 euros. However, this also added around 5,000 euros in court costs.
What arguments did the BMW driver use to defend himself against such evidence? He justifies his resistance against the verdict as follows:
- He was not informed of his rights by the police. A protocol signed by him contradicts this.
- The distance analysis was faulty because it was based on the lines on the road.
- He did not have to expect the braking of the vehicle and also had sports and racing brakes installed.
The higher court, according to the Aargauer Zeitung, was not very impressed by all of this.
Although most people probably don’t think of home office when it comes to car mechanics, Chris Pyle represents just that. The American serves all his customers online and has more than doubled his income within a few years: A car mechanic quit his full-time job at Ford to work from home – now he earns nearly 160,000 € a year
