The task of the study was a first-time comprehensive survey of the equipment of cars in Germany with vehicle safety systems. To do this, 5,070 households were interviewed about the equipment of vehicles available to them. 53 vehicle safety systems were selected for the survey. These include new systems such as Congestion Assistant and Intersection Assistant as well as widely established systems such as the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) and airbags. In addition to the users, experts who are professionally engaged in the buying or selling of cars for corporate fleets were also interviewed. These ten qualitative interviews give insight into the importance of various criteria in vehicle choice and specifically the importance of vehicle safety systems. Passive safety systems such as airbags, which aim to mitigate the consequences of an accident for those involved, are the most extensively deployed. But active and intervening systems, which avoid risks or assume individual driving tasks, are also frequently a part of vehicle equipment. The most common representatives of this group are Brake Assistant, ESP and cruise control. Most vehicle safety systems can be found in vehicles of the upper middle class and upper class. The number of security systems increases with annual distance traveled and frequency of use, as well as for newer vehicles and company cars. The results show a pattern: If systems are rare overall, the shares within the different vehicle segments differ considerably in some cases. New systems can then be found much more frequently in the vehicles of the upper middle class and upper class and often with no measurable shares in minis and small cars. The expert interviews which were conducted with fleet operators and vehicle sellers show that vehicle safety systems whose benefits are demonstrated are included in the standard equipment. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting