Collision avoidance technology poised to further reduce crashes

A variety of safety and collision avoidance technologies will continue to reduce the overall number and severity of crashes in the future, which could have significant implications for both the insurance and collision repair industries.

In July, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) hosted a policy briefing, "Do Smart Cars Equal Safer Roads?", in Washington, D.C. to discuss these innovations.

Historically, the auto industry has made great strides in protecting the occupants of a car after a crash," says Paul Feenstra, senior vice president of government and external affairs at the ITSA. "One of the really exciting things happening right now is a focus on preventing crashes from happening in the first place."

In a recent article by consulting firm Carlisle & Co., analyst David Carlisle forecast that if just 40 percent pf all registered vehicles included forward collision warning systems, 15 percent of potential collision repair jobs would vanish. If that happened, OEMs would lose a significant chunk of their parts revenue, as would aftermarket suppliers.

The combination of forward collision, side view assist, lane departure, and adaptive headlight technology could potentially eliminate an even larger chunk of avoidable repairs.

According to David Zuby, executive vice president and chief research officer for the IIHS, the type of smart cars the panel discussed are those that assist the driver by warning of potentially dangerous situations or modifying or taking control of vehicle systems to avoid collisions. Zuby says his organization estimates that the most common of these capabilities, electronic stability control, has reduced single vehicle rollovers by more than 80 percent over the past decade. Adaptive front lighting systems could also help reduce collisions. These systems adjust the direction of the headlight beam to follow the direction of the car.

Front crash prevention systems help drivers avoid the common front-to-rear collisions. "These systems prevent somewhere between 7 and 15 percent of crashes with other vehicles," Zuby says. "Adaptive headlights are preventing around 7 to 10 percent of crashes."

The front crash solutions are now being combined with lane control systems to provide what are known as traffic jam assist solutions that allow drivers to closely follow the vehicles in front of them without having to steer or manually control the speed. "That can provide more benefit than the front crash or lane departure warnings on their own," Zuby says.

In addition some automatic braking systems have been developed to respond to pedestrians and bicycles, in addition to other vehicles. By reducing speed, these systems can reduce the severity of injuries to pedestrians.

All of these innovations are leading up to driverless vehicles, which Google is already testing in several states. "These are all stepping stones to the autonomous vehicle," Zuby says. "Right now, the first implementations of this are going to be for limited situations like traffic jam assist or interstate driving, where the complexity of the driving situation is lower. Eventually, we'll have cars that can cope with more and more complexity."

A lot of crashes occur because drivers get distracted and make mistakes. "The value of these automated driving is that the systems can be distracted," Zuby adds. "A system that is reliable and can measure distance and speed can get things like left turns correct every time, theoretically. That's the biggest hurdle though: can the sensors be reliable and durable enough to last for the life of the car, and keep working in the same way as when they were new."

Vehicle-to-vehicle technology will also help prevent collisions. "That's the next step," Feenstra says, citing GM's recent announcement that it will roll out V2V-enabled vehicles in 2017. "We expect other auto companies to follow suit."

The Collision Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP) is a consortium of OEMs working with the Department of Transportation to develop V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure technologies so that they can be deployed in a standardized fashion using short-range communications. "That is extremely important because it will allow different manufacturers vehicles to communicate with each other," Feenstra says.

Vehicles will send out a beacon alerting all other vehicles of their location and direction. "The other vehicles will recognize that signal and either take measures to warn the driver, or even provide pre-emptive braking to avoid a collision," Feenstra says.

The NHTSA estimates that V2V could prevent or reduce the impact of four out of five unimpaired vehicle crashes. That would be huge, both in terms of its affect on safety and fatalities, and in its impact on the insurance and collision repair industries.

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