Nationwide, United States
Real-world Effectiveness of Model Year 2015–2020 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Summary Information
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) features are becoming increasingly standard on new vehicles, and their adoption is growing, owing to these systems’ potential to reduce the number and severity of traffic crashes, prevent many serious injuries, and save thousands of lives annually. The objective of this study was to explore the real-world effectiveness of ADAS in avoiding system-related crashes, using police-reported crash data and vehicle equipment data from 93 vehicle models for model years 2015 to 2020 that crashed in 13 states from January 2016 through August 2021. This study assessed the following ADAS features: Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB), Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA), and Lane Centering Assistance (LCA).
Lessons Learned
- Enhance understanding of ADAS usage and activation in different scenarios by incorporating additional data sources, such as vehicle-based telematics. This study utilized crash and vehicle equipment data. By incorporating vehicle-based telematics data in the future, it would offer a crucial opportunity to enhance the understanding of actual ADAS feature usage and activation, including whether and how features intervene in various situations.
- Fine tune analytic methodology to incorporate the element of aging vehicle models when estimating effectiveness of ADAS. As ADAS features become standard equipment on vehicles, the difference between the set of equipped and unequipped vehicles becomes more prominent as the model year of the vehicles increase, making it more challenging to accurately estimate effectiveness of ADAS without bias brought in by the vehicle model itself.
- Make room for public-private partnerships to develop new approaches for road safety. Working collaboratively, government and industry can better contribute to enhancing ADAS technologies to have maximum impact on roadway safety.
