Passive safety is the big success in car safety. Passive safety minimises the adverse consequences of a crash. At first glance active safety has the higher attraction. Is it not wiser to avoid a crash instead of lowering the consequences? The experience in respect of the reduction of casualties and vulneration with active safety is disillusioning. Almost all benefits of active safety are removed away by more powerful cars, increasing speed, traffic density, riskier driving. However, passive safety is not the ultimate measure in road safety. It is not economic to transport mass for safety measures. Software solutions are immaterial and thus the final answer. Not tomorrow, but in some decades sufficient intelligence in some decades sufficient intelligence of crash avoidance will be available to take some of the heavy, energy consuming mass out of the cars.
Abstract