This report summarizes the lessons drawn from a series of eight focus groups carried out in July and August, 1997. The groups were conducted as part of a larger project, undertaken on behalf of the USDoT Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, to appraise the potential customer acceptance for key ITS products and services directed at individual consumers. This particular component of the study was undertaken with the funding and participation of the USDoT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and was concerned exclusively with in-vehicle crash avoidance technologies. We studied the following safety problems and the ITS countermeasures under development to address those problems · Rear object crashes (back-up warning devices); · Run-off-the-road crashes (application of lane trackers); · Lane change/merge crashes (application of side object detection systems); · Rear-end crashes (application of front-object detection systems); · Drowsy drivers (application of driver monitoring systems); · Vision under degraded conditions, such as darkness, poor weather, or glare (vision enhancement systems); · Intersection crashes; and · Adaptive (“intelligent”) cruise control. Almost all of the product concepts explored in the focus groups were “safety services” identified in the federal government’s Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI). The focus groups had two principal objectives: · To improve our understanding of the initial reactions of new vehicle purchasers to these crash avoidance product concepts; and · To help develop improved content and methods for a proposed subsequent quantitative survey of new vehicle purchasers. (Author/publisher)
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