COLLISION WARNING WITH AUTO BRAKE- A REAL-LIFE SAFETY PERSPECTIVE

Automotive safety has gained an increasing amount of interest from the general public, governments, and the car industry. This is more than justified by traffic accident statistics, as each year around 1.2 million people die due to road traffic accidents. For these reasons safety remains a core value of Volvo Cars. This paper presents some of the latest active safety developments within Volvo Cars. Rear-end collisions are common accident scenarios and a common cause of these accidents is driver distraction and thus not reacting in time. No vehicle system is a substitute for the most important safety feature in any vehicle: the driver. However, Volvo is harnessing innovative technologies to help alert drivers to avoid potential collisions and reduce the potential impact speed when a collision cannot be avoided. One of those systems is Collision Warning with Auto Brake where the area in front of the vehicle is continuously monitored with the help of a long-range radar and a forward-sensing wide-angle camera fitted in front of the interior rear-view mirror. A warning and brake support will be provided for collisions with other vehicles, both moving and stationary. Additionally, if the driver does not intervene in spite of the warning and the possible collision is judged to be unavoidable; intervention braking is automatically applied to slow down the car. This aims at reducing impact speeds and thus the risk for consequences. This system has been verified using innovative CAE methods and practical tests. Finally, it is discussed how the benefit of such systems can be judged from real-life safety perspective using traffic accident statistics