A new study in the U.S. has revealed that automatic emergency braking continues to improve as it cuts rear-end crashes in half.
The latest study by the Partnership for Analytics Research in Traffic Safety (PARTS), pairing auto manufacturer equipment with police crash report data covering 98 million vehicles and 21.2 million crashes, is the largest and most comprehensive study of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to date.
In Australia, all new vehicles will need to include AEB technology from March 2025 following legislation introduced in 2023, a design rule that has the potential for some OEMs to end imports of non-compliant models.
Australian laws this year will relate to vehicle to vehicle avoidance in the most common rear end class of collision and will step up to include vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists by 2026.
The transition in the US has not been so smooth, despite laws being passed in April 2024 that have set a mandatory target for new vehicles for 2029.
The PARTS study
In January 2025, PARTS released results of its second study — the largest government-automaker study to date about the real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems in passenger vehicles. The study showed automatic emergency braking continues to improve as it cuts rear-end crashes in half. The study also found a 9 per cent reduction in single-vehicle frontal crashes with non-motorists for vehicles equipped with pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems.
This study is a follow-up to a previous ADAS effectiveness study released in 2022. It more than doubled the number of vehicle models included, and added three additional vehicle segments, three additional states, and three new model years. For the first time, the study included data from new PARTS members Ford and Hyundai. Other manufacturers contributing data to this study were General Motors, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Stellantis, Subaru, and Toyota.
The data showed an increase in AEB effectiveness, from 46 per cent across model years 2015–2017 to 52 per cent across model years 2021–2023, indicating that advancements in the technology have led to tangible improvements.
The data also showed a 9 per cent reduction in single-vehicle frontal crashes with non-motorists, including pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, and wheelchairs, for vehicles equipped with pedestrian automatic emergency braking (PAEB) systems. This is the first time a statistically significant measure of PAEB effectiveness has been quantified by PARTS. Pedestrian crashes are among the most severe forms of traffic crashes, with deaths accounting for 18 per cent of all traffic fatalities, according to NHTSA.