Like I said - there's no one answer.
Speed limiters take away the choice of maximum speed not minimum. Many cars already have variable limiters anyway in the form of cruise control. I'm not sure that has contributed to increased accidents? Do limiters on HGVs / PCVs cause increased accidents?
As things are, car design has evolved continually in a way which has arguably meant that modern cars have become far more forgiving of bad/sloppy driving so the engineering of cars lets people "get away with it". Yes, there are some safety benefits - ABS, crash worthiness etc, but on the other hand do these same features give people a false sense of confidence? For instance, I hear a lot of people saying they pay no attention to braking distances in the Highway Code because they know modern cars "have better brakes", in other words encouraging braking at the last minute. At the moment I drive two vehicles - a 1976 VW bus and a 2005 Fiesta. The Fiesta (a 1.6 turbo diesel) can be chucked round the place, sticks to the road extremely well, you can get away with being in the wrong gear quite easily and so on (it'll pull away in 2nd, do roundabouts in 4th). The van on the other hand takes a lot more thinking about - no power steering, not a huge amount of power, handling is much less forgiving (i.e. corners the car will comfortably go round without slowing down much, if at all, the van won't), gear changes aren't quick, and there's sod all power if you're in the wrong gear. I'd guess that some drivers with no experience of a vehicle that age would struggle to drive it properly. Point I'm making is that the skill needed to drive is already being engineered out of cars. Adding limiters in, therefore, could well be a benefit.
If standards are to improve, attitudes also need to change. The nations attitudes to cars are so embedded, changing them is something that will take some time. Attitudes won't change unless there's some pretty big changes in town planning and transport planning. Until car is not king - driver's attitudes will not change.
Ben Lovejoy said:
I would wager a very large sum of money that accident rates would then increase. We already have enough brain-dead drivers paying too little attention to their driving; with speed-limiters, they would then think they need pay no attention to their speed as the box will do it for them, so they'd just drive foot to the floor all the time.
The safe speed at any given moment depends on a great many factors, among them pedestrians, cyclists, traffic density, junctions, vision into same, weather conditions, road surface quality, light, braking performance of the vehicle, etc. A number painted on a bit of round metal (or programmed into a GPS) is an extremely poor substitute for intelligent modification of speed to conditions.
What we need is not further dumbing-down of driving, but the exact opposite: a higher standard.
Ben