Intelligent vehicles and advanced safety technologies have been the subject of discussion for many years and there is now a large range of production and near-production systems that claim to have significant safety benefits. However, evaluating the likely casualty savings of features intended to avoid an accident is difficult for a range of reasons. The main aim of this study was, rather than consider what casualty problem a particular system can influence, to focus on identifying the national casualty problems and to consider which safety functions are required to have substantial impacts on the biggest groups of accidents, and therefore casualties, in Great Britain. This prioritisation of safety functions: 1) identified the most effective way to address casualties in the key national accident groups, both in terms of the largest likely effect and the most cost beneficial effect; and 2) identified potential overlaps in the target populations for safety functions where the same casualty groups can be addressed by different primary safety countermeasures. (Author/publisher)
Abstract