Front crash prevention systems aren’t as effective at detecting large trucks and motorcycles and preventing collisions with them as they are with cars. Current systems reduce rear-end crashes with medium or heavy trucks by 38 % and motorcycles by 41%, compared with a 53 % reduction with passenger vehicles, but if the technology improved and was more widely implemented, an additional 5,500 crashes a year with trucks and 500 crashes with motorcyclists could be prevented.
Those are the highlights of new research announced earlier this month by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry.
“These reductions are impressive for all vehicle types, but the safety benefits could be even larger if front crash prevention systems were as good at mitigating and preventing crashes with big trucks and motorcycles as they are with cars,” Jessica Cicchino, the Insurance Institute’s vice president of research, said in a statement.
Most front crash prevention systems include forward collision warning, which alerts the driver when a rear-end crash is about to happen, and automatic emergency braking (AEB), which automatically slams on the brakes if the driver fails to respond in time.
Researchers found that the systems were substantially less likely to sound an alert when a collision with certain large vehicles or with a motorcycle was imminent than when the test vehicles were approaching the standard passenger car.
Motorcycles are more difficult for camera- and radar-based systems to identify, especially at higher speeds, according to the research, as they are smaller and narrower than cars, and extra-large vehicles would seem like they are easier to detect, but their size appears to confuse the systems’ algorithms.
“Motorcycles and large trucks present unique risks,” Cicchino added. “Along with being hard for other drivers to see, motorcycles don’t have a steel frame surrounding and protecting the rider the way cars do. At the other end of the spectrum, large trucks are so massive that when a passenger vehicle hits one, it’s more likely to be fatal to the people inside the passenger vehicle. The height of large trucks can also result in dangerous underride crashes.”
The Insurance Institute, in conjunction with Consumer Reports, announced that many automakers have fulfilled a voluntary commitment to equip nearly all the light vehicles they produce for the U.S. market with automatic emergency braking technology by the production year that ended Aug. 31.
The action could prevent 42,000 crashes and 20,000 injuries by 2025, the safety group estimated, based on its research that found that front crash prevention systems with both forward collision warning and automatic emergency
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