Advanced technologies in environmental sensing, situational perception and new actuators that allow individual situational based interventions in braking, steering or controlling the chassis characteristics are giving new option for the enhancement of automotive safety. Especially primary and pre-crash safety systems profit from these new opportunities and their potentials. The vision of an "accident free driving" was born. In a first wave advanced systems for mitigating or avoiding longitudinal accidents were developed and are penetrating the market. Therefore the question of the safety benefit that is achievable with these systems in real world accidents arises. The paper tries to find an answer for actual Mercedes-Benz primary and pre-crash safety systems. Primary safety systems are designed to help to avoid accidents or, if that is not possible, to reduce the dynamics of the vehicle to such an extent that the secondary safety measures are able to act best possible. The effectiveness is a measure for the efficiency, with which a safety system succeeds in achieving this target within its range of operation in interaction with driver and vehicle. The development objective for primary safety measure is the avoidance of accidents but avoided accidents are not contained in an accident database. Thus the efficiency of a primary safety measure in contrast to a secondary safety measure cannot be determined directly from accident data. Up to now, the effectiveness of a primary safety system has usually been determined in retrospect, through changes in the accident statistics, or prospectively by appropriate tests such as, for example, driving simulator tests with test persons or driving tests in the field e.g. naturalistic driving studies. The challenge is to extract components needed and reassembling them in a new method to be able to estimate the safety benefit of the advanced systems usually consisting of warning and reacting components. This study deals with the methodology to perform assessments of statistical representative efficiency of primary safety measures. The study is completed by estimating the safety benefit in real world accidents of purchasable Mercedes-Benz safety systems for assisting the driver in longitudinal accidents. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0510.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.
Abstract