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