It's an odd kind of rule following though, that includes driving at seventy kilometers an hour down a narrow street just because it's permitted, or roaring past a cyclist with a kid on the bike just because that's also legal.

I don't know if my native country (UK) has unusually good drivers, or if the germans are unusually bad, but my feeling is that german drivers are very good at following rules, and also quite good at killing pedestrians and crashing.

PS: just checked it up on wikipedia, and the data half-heartedly supports my position, depending on what metric you think is relevant. The German death rate from road traffic is relatively low, but the 'road fatality per kilometer' is relatively high. So essentially, when germans do drive, they frequently kill people, but thankfully, they don't do so much driving as other nations do.