To improve road safety, “you can design roads in certain ways to limit speed, enforce speed limits and use vehicle technology,” Dudley Curtis, a spokesman for the European Transport Safety Council, said in an interview on Wednesday.

He said the newly proposed rules were just one aspect of improving safety.

Mr. Curtis also noted that this was not new technology that would be imposed by the European Union: Some carmakers have already been selling new models fitted with it. The latest Ford models available in Europe have a system that, when enabled, uses a camera to recognize traffic signs and set the maximum speed according to local limits.

Volvo Cars said this month that starting in 2020 it would limit top speed on all its cars at 112 miles per hour. It cited data from American regulators showing that 25 percent of traffic deaths in the United States in 2017 had been caused by speeding.

“As humans, we all understand the dangers with snakes, spiders and heights. With speeds, not so much,” Jan Ivarsson, a safety expert with Volvo Cars, said in a statement earlier this month. “People often drive too fast in a given traffic situation and have poor speed adaptation in relation to that traffic situation and their own capabilities as a driver.”

Despite European Union-wide safety rules, inequalities between member states persist. According to bloc statistics, death rates on roads were more than twice as high in Bulgaria and Romania, among the bloc’s poorest members, compared with some of the wealthiest nations, including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden.

“One of the factors that divides Europe is an economic one,” said Mr. Curtis of the safety council. “Newer cars come to the richer countries first. There are also issues to do with infrastructure.”

Romania, for example, has few highways, which are generally considered among the safest areas of road transport.