Assessment of integrated vehicle safety systems for improved vehicle safety

Road safety is a major societal issue. In 2009, more than 35,000 people died on the roads of the European Union, i.e. the equivalent of a medium town, and no fewer than 1,500,000 persons were injured. The cost for society is huge, representing approximately 130 billion Euros in 2009. In view of this the European road safety policy orientations up to 2020 new technologies that have high potential to improve road safety should be promoted. This includes Integrated Safety Systems (ISS) like pre-crash systems with collision warning or autonomous vehicle actions. For such systems it is stated that “Accelerated deployment and broad market take-up of such safety enhancing applications needs to be supported in order for their full potential to be unleashed”. The ASSESS project is directly responding to this by developing test and assessment procedures for the evaluation of pre-crash systems. Methods are being developed for driver behavioural aspects, pre-crash sensing performance and crash performance under conditions influenced by pre-crash driver and vehicle actions. The gained know-how will be implemented in proposals for test and assessment procedures that will be evaluated on the basis of actual systems currently offered to the market. The ASSESS project started in July 2009. This paper presents results achieved during the first two years of the project including activities on test scenario definition, test tool development and first test results on driver behavioural aspects and pre-crash performance evaluation