IIHS to release new automated emergency braking guidelines

Automatic emergency braking systems, found in nearly 90 percent of 2021 vehicle models, decreased the odds of a pedestrian crash by about a third on well-lit roads, according to a new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study. However, they appear to make little difference on dark roads at night.

IIHS will release a new nighttime test and nighttime rating system for AEB systems this year, which will become part of the criteria for the 2023 Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ awards, the group said in a press release on Thursday.

In 2019, IIHS announced it would begin adding pedestrian protection to the criteria for its coveted Top Safety Pick ratings the following year. Half of the 2021 vehicle models with AEB passed with the highest possible rating.

While the systems can be effective during the daylight on well-lit roads, there is much work to be done to make them safer, Jessica Cicchino, IIHS's vice president of research, told Automotive News.

"Most pedestrian crashes happen during the day, but the issue is that most fatalities have been in the dark," she said.

Cicchino led a group that looked at nearly 1,500 police-reported crashes and compared the reports for identical vehicles with and without AEB. This was where she examined the lack of effectiveness of AEB on dark roads and the increased effectiveness on well-lit ones.

After noting this, IIHS created a nighttime track test, looking at eight small utility vehicles with AEB systems made by eight different manufacturers. The vehicles were tested twice, with low beams and high beams.

While high beams performed better, the difference in headlight quality did not significantly affect the vehicle's performance, Cicchino said.

The vehicles used a variety of AEB systems, either a single camera, dual camera, single camera and radar or radar only, IIHS said.

The Toyota C-HR and Ford Bronco Sport, which use a combination of cameras and radar, were the best performers in both tests. However, this did not mean that the camera-radar combination was the most effective, as other vehicles with this system, such as the Honda CR-V, performed relatively poorly.

It is unclear what caused the difference in performances.

The Volkswagen Taos uses a radar-only system and saw the least change in performance between daylight and the nighttime tests, but its daytime performance was still the worst of all the vehicles tested.

"We saw that there were no clear associations between the types of technology used and how well the vehicles did in our testing," Cicchino said.

There does not seem to be a simple solution to this problem. However, technology that has been introduced to vehicles, such as infrared sensing, was not available in the vehicles tested and may help improve AEB safety, she said.