Whilst participating at the 2015 Govt/Industry Meeting, InterRegs were among the first to hear two breaking announcements from NHTSA, when Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx appeared as an unscheduled luncheon speaker.
He revealed that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to add two cutting-edge Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems to the recommended advanced safety features included under its New Car Assessment Program (NCAP). The two features to be added are: Crash Imminent Braking (CIB) and Dynamic Brake Support (DBS).
NHTSA also announced the release of a new report which uses data from the agency's Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) to create a statistical model that estimated safety technologies have saved 613,501 lives since 1960. According to NHTSA data, one-third of all police-reported crashes in 2013 involved a rear-end collision with another vehicle at the start of the crash. The agency also found that a large number of drivers involved in rear-end crashes either did not apply the brakes at all or did not apply the brakes fully prior to the crash. CIB and DBS can intervene by automatically applying the vehicle's brakes or supplementing the driver's braking effort to mitigate the severity of the crash or to avoid it altogether.
NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said, "Adding AEB to our list of recommended features will encourage consumers to consider AEB as a factor in their new car purchase and encourage automakers to make this important innovation more widely available."