A new era of vehicle safety that focuses on preventing crashes, and not just protecting occupants in a crash is here. Within six years, 99 per cent of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. will have automatic emergency braking (AEB), a technology that senses an imminent collision with another vehicle, person or obstacle, and prevents it by braking without driver input.
The agreement by 20 major automakers and the U.S. government to make AEB standard on new light vehicles by 2022 was struck in March. It followed the release of research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showing that automatic braking and forward collision alert systems reduce the incidence of rear-end crashes by 39 per cent.
In an effort to determine what current safety data shows for the technology,
J.D. Power used the SafetyIQ platform to analyze National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. They found that only seven of 348 brake-related complaints for select 2016 models were related to emergency safety braking technology. None of the 1,361 brake recalls to date was related to AEB.
SafetyIQ Early Warning System analysis, which identifies the highest risk issues based on the likelihood that a complaint will result in a future recall, shows just three automatic braking complaints out of 4,089 high risk issues in 2015 and 2016.
“Full adoption of automatic emergency braking will provide a considerable benefit to the public, and our analysis shows that the introduction of this life-saving technology has led to very few quality issues or customer concerns so far,” says Dave Sargent, vice president, global automotive at J.D. Power.
