Car accidents caused by unintentional lane departure now feature significantly in accident research around the world. Systems for lateral support (or lane departure warning systems) can have a positive effect on these accidents and are seen by experts as being the second most important active safety measure that can be taken, right after advanced emergency braking systems. Accidents caused by unintentional lane departure are generally very serious because they often result in collisions with oncoming traffic or roadside obstacles such as trees at relatively high speeds. The significance of these accidents is also evident from the level of attention now being given to them by international test institutes (e. g. NHTSA, IIHS, Euro NCAP). At the European level, Euro NCAP has already made progress toward including systems for lateral support in its test program in future. Euro NCAP’s current roadmap includes the objective of providing a test procedure for lane departure warning systems from 2016. From 2018, a procedure will also be available for active lane keeping systems, which constitute a further development of lane departure warning systems. The relevance of accidents caused by unintentional lane departure has not yet been extensively investigated in Germany. The official accident statistics do not allow concrete statements to be made about these kinds of accidents. The reason for this is that the road accident reports on which the official statistics are based do not contain any information on unintentional lane departure because this is not recorded in police accident records. A previous UDV study provided an initial overview of car accidents caused by unintentional lane departure. The aim of the present study is to describe these accidents in more detail and identify the main accident scenarios in order to assist with the development of realistic future test procedures. The study also describes the complex methodology that is required for the identification of the relevant accidents and underlines the priority and challenge of this important part of the analyses. This paper was presented on the 24th ESV Conference 2015. (Author/publisher)
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