General Motors and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) released details of a study of the performance of collision avoidance technology on GM’s 2013-2017 product line. The results show that several of these features are making a statistically significant impact in helping to reduce crashes.
The study leveraged 3.7 million GM vehicles across 20 different models from 2013-2017. 15 different systems were evaluated using police report crash databases available to UMTRI from 10 states.
After comparing the crash instances involving vehicles with and without active safety features, the study showed that certain features evaluated had an impact in preventing the types of crashes the features were designed to help prevent or mitigate.
“This study is ground-breaking in terms of the broad range of vehicles and active safety and headlighting features examined,” said GM Safety Technical Fellow, Raymond Kiefer. “The results show that the GM active safety systems evaluated are addressing a wide range of common crashes that cause a staggering amount of injuries, property damage and cost to our customers and society, putting GM well on its way toward a vision of zero crashes.”
“A key finding of this work is that we can make substantial gains in safety through deployment of advanced driver assistance systems such as forward and rear emergency braking, rear cross-traffic alert, and others. In addition, we found that the more automated the system, the greater the benefits,” said UMTRI Research Associate Professor, Carol Flannagan. “This work looked at reduction in crashes associated with systems already in the hands of drivers in real-world driving environments. Our working relationship with GM is critical to our ability to evaluate the effects of these systems, and we hope that what we learned can motivate more widespread deployment of the most effective technologies.”
The study results for forward collision warning are comparable to a 2018 study on GM vehicles conducted by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) that saw a 43 percent reduction in police reported crashes and 64 percent fewer front-to-rear crashes with injuries than the same vehicles without any front crash prevention technology.
This article courtesy of Russell Thrall III, publisher CollisionWeek. Check out their website at: www.collisionweek.com.