Publication

Improvement of road safety is one of the main challenges for European transportation. A promising route towards reducing road fatalities is through a wider deployment of new in-vehicle technologies that help drivers avoid crashes or to mitigate crash severity. Assessing how well these technologies perform in terms of achieving their intended goals in the real-world is of key importance for making correct business and political decisions regarding their deployment. Such knowledge has so far largely been lacking; hence euroFOT was initiated with the aim of filling this gap by investigating the impact of a number of different functions have on regular drivers in real traffic. The present deliverable puts together the main results of the safety impact assessment conducted in euroFOT. By testing a multitude of hypotheses on the collected vehicle data and drawing on information from different European crash databases, in deliverable 6.4 we present an analysis that aimed to: 1 Investigate if the evaluated functions improve overall traffic safety;  2 Investigate if  the evaluated functions affect other aspects of driver behaviour, including  possible negative side effects; 3 Identify the size of the target crash population for each evaluated function, i.e. the set of real world crashes the function may be able to address in some way; 4 Given that a function affects safety within the experimental vehicle fleet, make a prediction on how the target crash population would change on an EU-27 level if that function was widely deployed; 5 Provide a set of lessons learned hints that future FOT’s can rely upon. Overall, the safety impact analysis pointed to a positive effect on a number of potentially safety-related measures when the evaluated functions were made available to the driver. Main findings include the following: In both cars and trucks, when drivers were following a lead vehicle while using ACC+FCW, time-headway increased significantly, and the relative frequency of harsh braking events and incidents decreased. In terms of changes in driver behaviour, car drivers using ACC+FCW were three times more likely to engage in visual secondary tasks during normal driving (e.g., reading maps, looking at passengers or objects in the car), but this difference was not found during incidents. These results imply that drivers seem to abort secondary tasks and focus on the road ahead when the traffic situation requires it. In addition, ACC+FCW presence does not seem to affect the amount of drowsy driving. For trucks, no particular side effects on driver behaviour were observed.