WASHINGTON — The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is weighing whether to increase the test speed used to evaluate automatic emergency braking systems as it looks for ways to encourage better technology that can prevent more severe front-to-rear vehicle crashes.
The insurer-funded institute on Thursday said it was considering increasing the speed of its vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention test to 35 to 45 mph after finding that the current test — conducted at both 12 and 25 mph — represents only a small percentage of the rear-end crashes the systems are designed to mitigate.
"Thankfully, in the real world, AEB systems are preventing crashes at higher speeds than the maximum 25 mph our test program uses," said David Kidd, IIHS' senior research scientist, who led the new study. "The problem is that our current evaluation doesn't tell us how well specific systems perform at those speeds."