AAA Says not All Emergency Braking Systems Prevent Accidents

Safety is an important concern for motorists. When 20 leading automotive manufacturers agreed to with federal regulators in the United States to make this feature mandatory within a period of six years in March this year, everyone heaved a sigh of relief.  The American Automobile Association however recently conducted a study which found that all automatic car emergency brakes do not prevent accidents. Some are designed just to minimize the impact of accidents. Few drivers are aware of this and may have the idea that just because their vehicle has an emergency braking system, their chances of becoming involved in a crash are minimal.

Automatic emergency braking systems automatically engage the brakes in dangerous situations when the driver fails to take action. Almost all cars made in the United States are expected to have automatic emergency brakes by 2022. However, this feature does have limitations.

In the study, for which the AAA joined hands with the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center, they tested five 2016 models which had automatic emergency brakes including a Honda Civic, a Subaru Legacy, a Volvo XC 90, a Lincoln MKX, and a Volkswagen Passat. The study also surveyed as many as 1,000 adult U.S. drivers to get an idea of consumer buying habits and the level of trust that the public has in the feature.

The study found that when activated, those systems which are meant to prevent crashes reduced vehicle speeds twice as much as those which are only meant to reduce the impact of a crash. According to John Nielsen, AAA’s managing director of automotive engineering and repair, more than two-thirds of U.S. motorists who are familiar with automatic emergency braking systems think that they help to avoid crashes without any intervention from the driver.

As a result of this wrong perception, motorists may place too much confidence in this technology and may engage in riskier driving behavior. In the tests in which the vehicle was driven at a speed lower than 30 miles per hour, the systems designed to prevent crashes managed to avoid collisions in 60% of the cases. Meanwhile, automatic emergency brakes which are meant to minimize the impact of the crash were able to completely avoid crashes only in 33 per cent of the test scenarios.

Currently, automatic emergency braking systems are offered as a standard feature on only 10 per cent of new vehicles and is available as part of optional packages for just over 50 per cent of all new models. 9 per cent of the drivers who participated in the survey said that their vehicles had automatic emergency brakes. This is expected to change over the next few years as automatic emergency brakes become more common for new models.

For example, Toyota is one manufacturer that has aggressively incorporated automatic emergency braking systems in its new models. According to the company, as many as 25 of 30 new Toyota and Lexus models will automatic emergency braking systems as a standard feature by the end of 2017.

Thus, Toyota will achieve the feat of making all its models compliant with the norms that require automatic emergency braking for all new cars as a standard feature five years ahead of the industry-wide deadline of 2022. The 20 car manufacturers who reached the agreement in March 2016 with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration account for 99% of the U.S. auto market.