Toronto, Ontario — The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has announced that it will be re-evaluating the conditions in which it runs automatic emergency braking system (AEB) testing to address front-to-rear collisions at higher speeds.
The institute is calling for OEMs to look into ways of preventing such collisions while also stating that the current AEB test, which evaluates systems at 24 and 40 km/h (15 and 25 mph respectively), will be scrapped and replaced with a new test.
IIHS said a new study has shown that its current test represents just 3 percent of real-world front-to-rear collisions.
A voluntary agreement between OEMs, put forward by the IIHS in 2016, has seen 12 of 20 automakers make good on a pledge to equip all of their light vehicles with AEB systems by Sept. 1, 2022.
“Thankfully, in the real world, AEB systems are preventing crashes at higher speeds than the maximum 25 mph our test program uses,” said senior research scientist at the IIHS, David Kidd.
“The problem is that our current evaluation doesn’t tell us how well specific systems perform at those speeds.”
Kidd’s 20-page study analyzed data from 6,731,215 police-reported rear-end crashes from the Crash Report Sampling System and 4,285 fatal rear-end crashes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System during 2016-2019.
He found that half of all non-fatal crashes happened on stretches of roads where the speed limit was 55 to 70 km/h and that 70 percent of fatal crashes occurred on roads where the speed limit was 90 km/h or higher.
Kidd also found that AEB’s safety benefits were reduced when roads were wet or snow-covered, when one of the vehicles in the crash was turning or changing lanes, or when the speed limit was 110 km/h or higher.
IIHS said it will conduct research tests on six AEB-equipped vehicles at speeds of up to 72 km/h. Different types of passenger vehicles, as well as motorcycles and large trucks, will be used as the stationary vehicle.
