February 6th 2022
Last year, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) examined ten vehicles, and out of those nine had the automatic emergency braking (AEB) vehicle technology. The AEB system works to identify pedestrians and apply brakes automatically if the driver fails to do so.
If we talk about the availability of AEB two years back, out of five vehicles IIHS picked for testing, only three had the emergency braking system. That’s the same year when the safety assurance company made it compulsory for vehicles to get an advanced rating as a minimum in vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention to achieve a Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ honours.
As per IIHS’s survey, pedestrian AEB tech has returned a 27 per cent drop in pedestrian crash numbers and a 30 per cent decline in injury collision values.
That said, a new IIHS study suggests that chances of a nighttime pedestrian collision for cars with our without the collision avoidance tech have no dissimilarity in the night. It is when three-quarters of serious pedestrian collisions occur.
To counter this, the safety agency decides to introduce the new nighttime pedestrian collision prevention grades sometime in 2022.
The IIHS carried out a number of evaluations in the dark to ascertain the best way to carry out nighttime pedestrian AEB trials. Through these tests, IIHS has determined that the present pedestrian AEB tech doesn’t work as efficiently at night as it does in the daytime.
To conduct the evaluation, the agency picked eight small SUVs, each having either a single camera, a dual camera, a single camera, and radar, or radar only. As we are aware, camera-based AEB systems require light to detect an object or hindrance.
The Volkswagen Taos employing only a radar for its automatic emergency braking witnessed the smallest decline in effectivity at night. On the other hand, it was not among the best during the daytime tests.
Moving further, IIHS found that the Toyota C-HR and Ford Bronco Sport employing an AEB system with a camera and a radar did best in the dark.
On the other hand, surprisingly the Subaru Forester and Chevrolet Trailblazer, both using a camera-only AEB tech, yielded parallel nighttime results to three SUVs (the Honda CR-V, Volvo XC40, and Hyundai Venue) with a camera-and-radar arrangement.
“Some systems worked much better than others in the dark, but there was no single type of technology that got better results,” stated David Aylor, manager of active safety testing at IIHS.
Source: IIHS
Image: Digital Trends