Nearly every car in America now has an automatic emergency braking (AEB) system that applies the brakes when it detects an object in front of it.
Now that nearly every automaker installs this technology in its vehicles, safety advocates are turning their attention to how well the systems work.
Related: How Does Automatic Emergency Braking Work?
A new round of testing from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) finds that AEB systems are improving.
About the IIHS
Car insurance companies have financial reasons to want car accidents to be rare and minor. To help the auto industry achieve this, they fund their own safety lab.
The IIHS conducts crash tests and other safety tests and studies accident data its members then collect.
About the Tests
For this round of tests, the institute collected 30 new cars, including mainstream and luxury models, from several vehicle classes.
They had each vehicle approach stationary targets representing a car, a tractor-trailer, and a motorcycle. Each performed three runs at 31, 37, and 43 mph.
They rated each vehicle Good, Acceptable, Marginal, or Poor based on whether it warned the driver at least 2.1 seconds before the “projected time of impact” and whether it reduced speed substantially.
Twenty-two of the 30 vehicles tested earned a Good or Acceptable score. Last April, the IIHS notes, only three of 10 vehicles tested earned a Good or Acceptable rating.
“The rapid progress manufacturers have made to improve these vital crash avoidance systems is impressive,” says IIHS President David Harkey.
“The good-rated systems delivered timely forward collision warnings and came to a complete stop before impact in all the trials with the passenger car target. They also met those performance standards in most trials with the motorcycle target and provided timely warnings in all the trials with the semitrailer,” the IIHS says.
“For vehicles that did not rate as well, the motorcycle tests were the most common stumbling block.”
Vehicles that scored an Acceptable rating avoided an accident in “the large majority of the trials,” but “all failed to prevent a collision with the motorcycle target in the 43 mph test scenarios, in some cases hitting the target at speeds of more than 25 mph.”
“All the poor-rated vehicles hit the motorcycle target in the slowest, 31 mph, test with the target centered. Some barely reduced speed or did not issue timely warnings.”
The Scores
Why Things May Be Getting Better Quickly
The institute’s results resemble those AAA found in testing last October.
Why would automakers finally be perfecting a technology some have advertised for roughly two decades?
Likely because they’re about to be held accountable for it for the first time.
Until now, AEB has been unregulated. In April, the federal government announced rules that will mandate AEB on all cars sold in the U.S. beginning in 2029.
Mandating something everyone already does sounds strange, but the move allows government regulators to start their own tests much like these. Building a system you can advertise is a mild challenge. Building a system that must pass a test to be sold in the U.S. is much harder.
With the pressure of a test looming, automakers are finally perfecting the technology.