On December 21, 2023, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced the results of two new studies on frontal collision avoidance systems and how they detect vehicles that are not other cars.
One study analyzed more than 160,000 police-recorded crash reports from 18 states that met certain criteria, while the other study focused on how current New Car Assessment Programs (NCAPs) evaluate forward collision warning (FCW) and automatic emergency braking (AEB) features in new cars.
The results of both studies pointed to the need for significant improvements in the way frontal collision avoidance systems detect trucks and motorcycles.
The more formal title of this study is “Are front crash prevention systems less effective at preventing rear-end crashes where trucks and motorcycles are struck?”, and is authored by Jessica B. Cicchino and David K. Cicchino. Cicchino and David G. Kidd.
The authors analyzed data from more than 160,000 two-vehicle rear-end collisions in which a passenger vehicle was the vehicle that struck the rear of another vehicle. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call this vehicle the Striker. In this study, Strikers could have frontal collision avoidance systems (such as FCW and/or AEB systems) or not.
The study also analyzed the types of vehicles hit in the accidents analyzed, dividing them into three categories: passenger car, medium/heavy truck and motorcycle.
In this analysis, the researchers used information from the VIN decoder to determine the correct category of the vehicles involved in the accidents, where possible. This was useful for correctly categorizing large pickups, which were sometimes wrongly classified as “trucks” in police reports. (For categorization purposes, the researchers defined a medium/heavy truck as a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight of more than 4,536 kg).
Importantly, Cicchino and Kidd observed that frontal collision avoidance systems were associated with a 53% reduction in rear-end collisions involving Strikers crashing into other passenger vehicles. However, that percentage dropped significantly when it came to avoiding rear-end collisions with medium/heavy trucks and motorcycles.
The analysis, which included data from 18 states, found only a 41% reduction in rear-end accident rates where the vehicle hit was a motorcycle. In the case of medium/heavy trucks, the figure was worse; only a 38% reduction was observed.
According to their estimates, the researchers wrote that around 5,500 additional accidents involving medium/heavy trucks and 500 accidents involving motorcycles could potentially be avoided if frontal impact protection systems were improved so that they recognized medium/heavy trucks and motorcycles as well as they currently recognize other passenger vehicles.
In addition, they noted that “almost half of motorcycle accidents are two-vehicle accidents in which the other vehicle was a passenger car”.
Beyond that, however, there was another worrying observation that didn’t involve rear-end accidents with motorcycles.
Here, the researchers wrote “For example, Teoh (2023) reported that more than a quarter of two-vehicle motorcycle accidents involved the other vehicle turning left in front of the motorcycle, which could be solved by left-turn assistance systems that detect motorcycles.” In other words, left turn assist systems do some of the hard work of seeing motorcycles when drivers, for whatever reason, simply don’t.