Forward collision warning systems show greatest potential

New technologies including forward collision warning and lane departure warning show more potential to avoid or mitigate crashes, including fatal ones, according to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
In its latest Status Report, IIHS researchers categorized the kinds of crashes that five emerging technologies are intended to prevent or mitigate. To determine the scope of the featured technologies’ potential benefits, the researchers then counted the number of crashes in each category occurring during 2002-06, assigning relevant crashes to the technologies designed to prevent them.
Forward collision warning with automatic braking (all relevant collisions: 2.268 million, and fatal collisions: 7,166) and lane departure warning (all relevant collisions: 483,000 and fatal collisions: 10,2345) showed the greatest potential, IIHS researchers found.
But blind spot detection systems don’t show as much potential to reduce deaths, simply because not as many fatal crashes (all relevant: 457,000 and fatal: 428) are relevant to this technology, the IIHS says.
Adrian Lund, IIHS president, cautions against becoming a cheerleader for new crash avoidance technologies. “For the most part the features being installed in current models simply give drivers information. How will the drivers respond? Will they use the information correctly? Will it elicit the right response? Will drivers become annoyed by too much information?”
Lund says the features aren’t on enough vehicles to conduct controlled evaluations of the benefits. “What we can do is compare their promise based on how many crashes they have the potential to prevent and how they’ll prevent them.”