- Letting the car decide when you should brake makes a difference, it turns out.
- Based on insurance claims for some GM and Subaru vehicles, IIHS said rear AEB can reduce damage liability claims by 28 percent, while a backup camera or those beeping sensors reduce that by just 5 percent.
- Since rear AEB is not widespread, IIHS said it is not going to use it as a requirement for its Top Safety Pick designations anytime soon.
Backing up a car is often a safe process, but it could certainly be safer. And it is, when a vehicle is equipped with rear automated emergency braking (AEB) technology. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has released results of a new study that found rear AEB helps reduce the number of insurance claims more than any other safety technology the group has studied.
Rear AEB uses the same ultrasonic sensors that in many vehicles beep at the driver if there’s something in the way of the moving car, but the “A” means the vehicle will automatically stop if it determines it’s about to hit an object. That small but important change drops the number of property damage liability claims by 28 percent and the number of collusion claims by 10 percent, IIHS found. Compared to other backup safety technologies that help prevent incidents, none are as effective as rear AEB. Rear cameras and parking sensors, for example, each reduced property damage liability claims by 5 percent and had minimal impact on collusion claims.
“When you compare vehicles with [rear AEB] and vehicles without, we’re seeing significant reductions in the frequency of insurance claims, bigger than the reductions we’re seeing for other technologies,” Joe Young, IIHS director of media relations, told Car and Driver.
IIHS first calculated data for insurance claims for vehicles with rear AEB technology in 2017, using numbers from 2015 model General Motors vehicles (and some some from 2013 and 2014), including the Cadillac ATS, CTS, SRX, XTS, and Escalade. The new study adds in details for model year 2015–2018 Subarus, including the Legacy, Outback, Forester, Impreza, and Crosstrek. These two automakers were chosen because they were able to provide IIHS with the feature-level data required to analyze the numbers.
Despite the dramatic impacts rear AEB has on insurance claims, the technology is available on only around 30 percent of 2020 models, either as standard or optional equipment, Young said. IIHS is not pushing for any regulatory changes around rear AEB at the moment and has no plans to incorporate it into the group’s Top Safety Pick assessments in the near future. IIHS does use front crash prevention performance in deciding which vehicles are named Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick+ recipients. It’s also keeping a list of automakers that have fulfilled earlier pledges by adopting front or rear AEB.
“We hope that automakers see the clear benefit to their customers and add the technology to more vehicles,” he said. “While we do carry some ratings for rear AEB systems, given that the technology isn’t as widespread, it’s not a major focus of our testing at the moment . . . It’s our hope that more automakers will add the technology since the potential is clearly quite large.”
While precise figures are not public, Young said it’s unlikely that adding rear AEB is a big expense for automakers since the cost of adding rear AEB is often bundled with other technologies and relies on the ultrasonic parking sensors that are already standard or optional on many new vehicles.
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Source: Motor - aranddriver.com
