IIHS discusses vehicle safety improvements, road ahead for ADAS

David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute (IIHS-HLDI), shared during a TechTalk 360 webinar on Wednesday that while OEMs are continually improving in-vehicle safety features, more progress is still needed by many stakeholders, including legislators.

When asked about the overall understanding of the importance for performing proper post-collision recalibrations as more ADAS-equipped vehicles hit the road, Harkey said, based on conversations IIHS is having with collision repairers, there has been improvement. The improvement is likely due to technician and repair shop training, installation and use of better equipment, and OEMs doing a better job of getting shops to understand what needs to be done and how it needs to be done, he said.

“There’s still a lack of self-diagnostics within these systems, within these sensors, that are on the vehicles,” Harkey said. “There is still a problem out there of not knowing if you have to go get it repaired… We would like to see all of these systems have some sort of self-diagnostic capability so that you, as a customer, know if that system is working or not, or if you need to take it in for some kind of repair.”

One legislative concern the IIHS has voiced is the call to cut safety features to make vehicles more affordable, following the average purchase price reaching $50,000 last year.

“Sacrificing safety is the wrong way to go,” he said. “When you look at the return on investment from the safety features that have gone into vehicles all the way back to when we started adding seatbelts, airbags, electronic stability control systems — all of these features have prevented thousands upon thousands of accidents and thousands upon thousands of deaths historically. And the same is true for the technology of today. We’re preventing crashes, we’re preventing fatalities, and you do not want to take away the safety features that are in vehicles.”

Harkey added that consumers don’t have to spend $50,000 for a safe vehicle.

“You can get a safe vehicle for under $25,000, you can get a vehicle that qualifies as a Top Safety Pick+ winner,” he said.

Added convenience features, such as retractable mirrors with defrost capabilities and more advanced Level 2 systems like Super Cruise, as well as consumer preference for larger vehicles, are driving up vehicle prices, Harkey added.

He said today’s vehicles are performing extremely well in IIHS’s crash tests.

“The occupant compartment, the survivable space inside the vehicle, remains intact, and we have a number of airbags now that are surrounding the occupant and protecting the occupant,” Harkey said. “We have made a lot of progress… Vehicles are safer today than they have ever been.”

According to Harkey, over time, OEMs have made noteworthy safety improvements to their vehicles, especially meeting IIHS’s frontal crash test parameters.

“We do not have a vehicle now that will get anything but a good rating in this particular test,” he said. “We see that with every test we introduce.

“You are 46% less likely to be killed in a head-on crash if you are in a vehicle that has gotten a good rating in our moderate overlap test versus one that gets a poor rating. We are improving those fatality and crash outcomes as well. The cycle that we go through is to look at these real-world crashes, come up with what the tests are going to look like, and our testing protocols. We do the vehicle evaluations, we develop the ratings, and then periodically we go back, and we look at what the real-world effectiveness is, what those outcomes are looking like, and then we start over again.”

IIHS recently increased the weight of its barrier in its side impact tests as the number of heavier SUVs on U.S. roads has risen. Speed was also increased to match real-world trends.

Its frontal moderate overlap test was also recently updated to include a rear seat passenger.

“We’ve seen the fatality risk change from the front seat to the rear seat, not because the rear seat’s gotten less safe, but because we’ve put all the technology and the airbags into the front seat,” Harkey said.

IIHS research also includes testing headlights for visibility and glare.

“If you’re in a vehicle that has good rated headlights, you’re 19% less likely to be involved in a single-vehicle nighttime crash than if you’re in a vehicle that has poor rated headlights,” Harkey said. “It matters in terms of the ultimate outcome. Similarly, when we started testing front crash prevention systems, you’ll see at 12 and 25 miles per hour, the vehicles did not always perform very well. They ran into our barrier at that time as we were doing these evaluations. Over time, they’ve gotten a little better.”

Almost all of the vehicles IIHS rates in the test at 12 and 25 miles per hour, whether while approaching another vehicle or approaching a pedestrian, perform extremely well, he added.

“We’ve gone back to look at the real-world data again, and what we are finding is a lot of these rear-end collisions are occurring at much higher speeds than 25 miles per hour, so we have upped the speed of our tests now to 43 miles per hour,” Harkey said. “We also have noticed specific problems with some of these systems with different types of targets.”

Roughly 90% of tested vehicles receive IIHS’s top rating at 12 and 25 miles per hour; however, as the new tests have been introduced, that’s dropped back down to about 43%.

“The OEMs, again, have work to do, and I have no doubt that they will make improvements and we’ll see these systems perform better in the future,” Harkey said.

As for pedestrian crashes, most occur during the day, but 75% of the pedestrian fatalities occur at night, he said.

“Anything that we can do from our front crash prevention systems to improving headlights is really, really important for pedestrian safety,” Harkey said. “They’re performing pretty well. If you look at the top two ratings, about 88% of the vehicles now get one of our top two ratings in our pedestrian testing, which includes those day and nighttime tests.”

The systems are also performing well in real-world crashes, according to IIHS research.

“We get about a 50% reduction in passenger vehicle to passenger vehicle sorts of crashes,” Harkey said. “As we’ve done that analysis, [there is] about a 27% reduction in vehicles that have pedestrian AEB systems versus those that don’t. We’re getting about a 40% reduction for those large trucks that have AEB systems versus those that don’t.

“What you see is over time with these systems, they have gotten better, they have improved, and the number of claims is going down.”

However, collision severity is going in the opposite direction, he said.

“The number of incidents are going down, the severity of these incidents are going up,” he said. “You multiply these and you get the overall losses. When you look at those overall losses, the reduction in frequencies, despite the severity going up, is enough to drive overall losses down.

“By 2040, we’re estimating we’ll have 90% of the vehicles that will have automatic emergency braking systems available. That’s a long time. And so we need to be thinking about other things that we can do in the interim to prevent harm on our roadways.”

IIHS is advocating for the nationwide adoption of a person-centric safe system approach, Harkey said.

“The real key here is redundancy,” he said. “We want to build in redundant features, redundant countermeasures or interventions, so that if you fall through one part of the safety net, there’s another part to catch you. No one should die on our roadways because they make a mistake. And one of the real keys to all of this being successful is partnerships and collaboration.”

Part of reducing traffic-related fatalities is to reduce the speeds at which vehicles are traveling, he added. One way IIHS thinks this can be done is to reduce speed limits.

“Policy decisions have to be part of the mix here,” Harkey said. “We’re seeing a number of cities do this. They’re actually lowering their citywide speed limits, and it’s having a positive impact. We’ve been able to evaluate a couple of these, and we’ve seen reductions in speeds, and we’ve seen reductions in speed-related crashes as a result.”

Improved lighting on road infrastructure is another way to reduce fatalities, especially nighttime pedestrian-involved crashes, he said. Rectangular rapid flash beacons installed at mid-block crosswalks, which have been in place for a while, have led to a nearly sixfold increase in vehicles yielding to pedestrians.

“If we combine those beacons with triggered illuminators to light up the crosswalk when a pedestrian enters it, we can more than double the number of vehicles yielding to pedestrians,” Harkey said.

Images

Featured image provided by IIHS