One thing I noticed last year when driving in France for the first time, compared to the UK was that there was a much greater difference in speed between the lanes. I imagine the difference would be even greater on the Autobahn. In the UK, the motorways have a speed limit of 70mph, and most people actually do it - very large vehicles are limited to 60mph. So emerging from the left lane to go around something slow only involves adding 10mph or so. In France, the right lane is often limited by a lorry going at 90km/h, while the left lane is at 130km/h. Emerging to go around something (if you have the misfortune of having to slow down behind the lorry because the left lane is busy) involves adding 40km/h to your speed before the next car in the left lane catches up, which involves a lot more power to do safely.
That's something different. Of course there are loads of people speeding too.
One other thing I notice is that different motorways in the UK have different characters. On some, yes people do tend to stick to the limit, and on others not so much. I haven't spotted a correlation yet with the locations of speed cameras.
