ESC, LDW, AEB technologies reduce car crashes

 The Research Council for Automobile Repairs (RCAR) is an international body of insurance funded automotive research centres, whose primary goal is to reduce the human and economic costs of motor vehicle losses.

The P-Safe Working Group within RCAR is an insurer focussed research/advisory group. The aim of the group is to investigate new Primary Safety technologies (hence “P-SAFE”) entering the vehicle market and investigate their potential positive or negative influence on motor insurance claims. Vehicle safety technology is categorised into three areas; Primary, Secondary and Tertiary safety.

Secondary Safety refers to systems designed to mitigate injuries during a collision, such as airbags and seat belts.

Primary safety systems relate to technologies that help to avoid or reduce the severity of the collision.

Tertiary safety systems operate post-collision, and alert the emergency services to potential injuries.

The P-Safe group has chosen to focus on three main types of primary safety technology initially. These three technologies are Electronic Stability Control (ESC), Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), and Lane Departure Warning (LDW). ESC was selected because research has already shown that ESC is effective in reducing crashes. AEB and LDW were selected because these technologies could help address commonly occurring crash types.

Overall, the most common collision types seem to be rear-end collisions, pedestrian collisions, leaving the carriageway, collision at junctions and head-on collisions. In the development of Primary Safety Systems manufacturers should consider addressing these crash types. It appears that Autonomous Emergency Braking systems (AEB) would be the most appropriate to address these collisions types, particularly for rear-end, head-on and pedestrian collisions that are most common. LDW and ESC could also offer some benefit in reducing single car leaving carriageway crashes.

Estimates from the German Insurance Association for the current AEB on the market (giving a warning of an imminent collision and automatically applying brakes) show that collisions could be reduced by around 12%. They have taken this analysis a step further to consider a hypothetical system that is not yet on the market, which can additionally address collisions at junctions with vehicles, as well as pedestrians and cyclists approaching from the sides and driving in front. This hypothetical system could reduce collisions by 46%, and this type of analysis should be used by vehicle manufacturers to guide their development of primary safety technologies in the future to meet real world need.

Thatcham researchers have made estimates based on crash frequency in the UK to estimate the effect of fleet-wide fitment of City Safety, the Low Speed Avoidance technology from Volvo. These estimates reveal that for 351,000 crashes, where the driver does not brake, the system could therefore help to prevent or mitigate the crash, which will equate to around a €1.3 billion saving in repair costs. This will also prevent around 150,000 whiplash injuries.

IIHS identified the kinds of crashes that five primary safety technologies are intended to prevent or mitigate. Two systems, AEB and LDW, show more potential to avoid or mitigate crashes, including fatal ones. Of the nearly 2.3 million crashes that occurred annually during 2002-06 and might have been prevented by frontal collision avoidance systems, more than 7,000 involved occupant deaths. If this feature, assuming full fleet fitment on passenger vehicles, could prevent half of these crashes, the safety potential would be substantial.
Previous research by IIHS evaluated rumble strips, finding they reduce head-on crashes and oncoming side-swipes as well as run-off-the-road crashes by 25-30%. If lane departure warning works as well as rumble strips, more than 100,000 collisions per year and 2,500 deaths could be prevented when all vehicles have this feature.

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