Possible Futures of Vehicle Safety

Abstract

This paper proposes an overview of achievements in the safety benefits (lives extended and injuries mitigated) provided by current or close-to-market vehicle technologies. It also proposes to review some of the research and developments in future vehicle safety such as connected vehicles and automated driving. It finally discusses expected safety benefits, and potentials as well as barriers to a large dissemination of these current and future technology-based traffic safety measures. As they are mostly foreseen in high income countries in the middle term, another type of revolution is needed in low and middle income countries for before these technologies can be put onto all global markets at a reasonable cost and contribute to the safety benefits of all road users. Frugal safety, coming from the frugal engineering concept, would be the recommended way to enable and accelerate this deployment. As for vehicle safety technologies already on the market, they have proven to be highly effective in mitigating vehicle occupant injuries, and injuries of vulnerable road users. Secondary safety devices and basic driver assistance systems have been largely evaluated and the effectiveness of seat belts, load limiters, pretensioners, airbags, car structure, electronic stability control (ESC), emergency brake assist (EBA) and other such devices have been examined. Available results show that, for example, if all cars were Euro NCAP five stars and fitted with EBA and ESC, compared to four stars without ESC and EBA, injury accidents would be reduced by 47%, all injuries would be mitigated by 68% and severe + fatal injuries by 70% (Page et al. in 53th AAAM conference, Baltimore, 2009). Unlike secondary safety systems, ESC, ultrasonic park assist, cornering lights and manual speed limiters, most of the primary safety systems or advanced assistance systems (such as blind spot detection, lane departure warning, lane keeping assist, automated cruise control, night vision and high speed AEB) are not, or just poorly, deployed on the market. There are a few reasons for this. First, their maturity and their capacity to work well without too many counter effects are recent, technological barriers have been strong for a long time. They were launched first in luxury cars in the USA, Japan and Western Europe in the mid-2000s and democratization has started just a few years back. Secondly, these features are costly, in terms of unit price and also in terms of investment; and their deployment demands progress in cost reduction. Thirdly, their expected safety benefits are, to a certain extent, not really known. If it is now epidemiologically demonstrated that secondary safety features bring safety, as well as ESC, the positive effectiveness of not yet largely deployed primary safety devices is only estimated and not yet proven, except for some of them like low speed automatic emergency braking (AEB). Studies about effectiveness of these devices take into account the potential in saving lives of generic functions, but a lot is still unknown about the real-world usage and acceptance by drivers and pedestrians of these applications. As there are many variants of these features, and especially concerning the mode of restitution to the driver of the information, the alert, or the warnings, the genuine efficiency of each variant is still a mystery. Of course, in-house studies by suppliers and car manufacturers anticipate positive acceptance by drivers and have identified and countered possible counter effects. Of course, current research is evaluating their potential to safety and in covering real-world driver needs, but a large field of research is still open for their safety assessment in real-life. Anyhow, the introduction of vehicle safety technologies is supposed to bring safety for a variety of road users and a variety of crash configurations. Of course, they will first be disseminated in high income countries but they will also be further disseminated, expectedly quickly, in the rest of the world under the pressure of customer demand, competition between vehicle makers as well as pressure from all kinds of New Car Assessment Programs, NCAP’s (Latin NCAP in South America, Bharat NCAP in India, Asian NCAP in Asia, etc.), and more generally from Global NCAP, which federates NCAP’s all over the world. This will be a first step in the globalization of existing or close-to-development vehicle safety technologies. Now, further on, emerging (more complex) technologies such as connectivity (vehicle-to-X communications) and automated driving will bring additional opportunities to tackle road crashes by adding safety applications not yet covered by passive safety or traditional (advanced) assistance systems. Actually connected technologies for safety and driving assistance systems in the current world of stand-alone technologies have three additional values:

• Improve the robustness of current systems by enhancing/duplicating capabilities and functionalities.

• Replace existing systems at a lesser cost.

• Add new functionalities to current ones and then expand the potential of coverage of various crash configurations and risk factors. For example, the EU-funded Drive C2X has selected 9 applications that are mainly safety-related (most of them address the so-called risk awareness issue, i.e., a crucial information needed by users and preventing them from a potential road hazard. The danger does not require an immediate action from the driver but requires an increase in attention and situation consciousness), but that can have also an impact on efficiency, mobility and the environment.

Furthermore, the automated driving allows some kind of delegation of driving tasks from the driver to the system, from partial delegation (e.g., lateral control in congested traffic) to full automation (driver out of the loop or even out of the vehicle). Even though the technologies are not really fully reliable and robust, automated cars are largely experimented with in the USA (and not only the much-publicized Google or Tesla cars), in Europe and in Japan and are presented as the future of the automobile. These cars are expected to bring extremely large safety benefits when the technologies are mature and the driver errors eradicated. Finally, frugal safety is a concept that helps in identifying ways to reduce dramatically the costs of technologies, both in the devices themselves and in the process to produce the devices and their integration in the vehicles. Examples of vehicle-to-X technologies, automated driving functions and frugal safety devices illustrate our discussion about the promises of such technological revolutions. They are expected to highly contribute to crash and injury reductions to an extent never achieved by traditional safety measures so far.

Human Kind is condemned to progress. Till eternity

Alfred Sauvy (French economist)