The safety potential of automatic emergency braking and adaptive cruise control and actions to improve the potential

Abstract

The study investigates the potential of Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems to prevent fatal rear-end, intersection and pedestrian crashes in Finland. The systems’ possibilities to prevent crashes were assessed using data on 115 in-depth investigated fatal crashes. The data includes all fatal crashes in the three studied crash types in 2014–2016. This study considers the impact of estimated speed, weather conditions and intentionality on the systems’ operation. AEB and ACC could potentially have prevented 41% of the crashes. The highest safety potential in terms of share of hypothetically prevented crashes was recognised in rear-end (45%) and pedestrian crashes (45%) and the lowest in intersection crashes (36%). This study complements previous research, which amount is low especially considering the potential to reduce pedestrian and intersection crashes, and which has typically been limited in the aspects that are considered in analysing the safety potential.