All passenger vehicles and large trucks sold in the U.S. would have to be equipped with passive emergency braking systems under a provision of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill now under consideration by the House.
The bill requires the Secretary of Transportation to make a rule establishing minimum performance standards for such anti-crash technology, and to require all passenger cars and large trucks to be sold with systems that alert the driver if a crash is imminent, and automatically apply the brakes if the driver fails to do so. Passenger cars would also have to be equipped with lane-monitoring and lane-keeping systems and be able to correct the course of the vehicle’s travel if the driver fails to do so. The bill leaves it up to the Secretary of Transportation when the new regulations would be imposed, including any phase-in period.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) have long been advocating the adoption of crash-avoidance technology, using HLDI’s volumes of claims data to evaluate this feature on passenger vehicles. According to the IIHS, police-reported crash data shows that crash avoidance technology could cut front-to-rear crashes in half.
“This bill pushes U.S. road safety policy forward in a number of areas, and we can see the work of IIHS-HLDI clearly reflected in many of the provisions,” said IIHS-HLDI President David Harkey. “In some cases, the legislation is catching up with industry changes that we have already set in motion, while in others, the bill could tee up meaningful progress on issues that we have been sounding the alarm on for years.”
IIHS reported in December 2020 that 10 automakers have fulfilled a voluntary commitment to equip nearly all the new light vehicles they produce for the U.S. market with automatic emergency braking (AEB), ahead of the 2022-23 agreement target brokered by IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration in 2015. In all, 20 manufacturers promised to equip at least 95% of certain vehicles with the crash avoidance technology by the production year beginning 1 September 2022. The agreement covers light-duty cars and trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 8,500 pounds or less, just under 4 tonnes.
“This voluntary effort is succeeding in getting an important crash prevention technology into vehicles quickly,” added Harkey. “It’s great to see AEB become a mainstream safety feature that’s now standard equipment not just on luxury cars and SUVs, but on affordable models as well.”
This article courtesy of John Huetter of Repairer Driven Education (RDE). Check out the website at; http://www.repairerdrivennews.com/.