Hector Fratty

Daniel Stern, DVN
At the SAE Government-Industry meeting last month in Washington DC, top researchers, regulators, and practitioners exchanged ideas, questions, and findings. The presentations were very encouraging not only in their content but also in the high degree of communication across these important sectors of the lighting and driver assistance industry. Major American entities were present and participating. Not only NHTSA which writes U.S. vehicle safety standards, but also IIHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. This research and advocacy board, funded and populated by the U.S. auto insurance industry, has been watching and keeping track of trends in frequency and nature of insurance claims for vehicles with various new safety systems. And their findings are very significant. The IIHS study compared equipped and non-equipped vehicles from a variety of perspectives to filter out extraneous and confounding factors that could give a false impression. From each perspective, the picture was the same: vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems capable of intervening on a driver’s behalf in critical situations incur fewer and less costly insurance claims than comparable vehicles without the systems. This is direct, real-world evidence that advanced driver assistance technology provides real, significant, and substantial safety benefits: Fewer crashes, and those that occur are less severe. Projections were presented for the potential reduction in crash rate and severity as progressively more vehicles are equipped with ADAS, by reference to the progressive spread through the on-road vehicle population of airbags and of electronic stability control. North American regulators are sometimes perceived as frustratingly slow to warm up to new vehicle safety technology and technique, but they tend to move in response to hard, real-world data showing definite safety performance benefits, and so the future looks bright for advanced driver assistance in North America.