Where is car safety heading next?

Australia’s independent vehicle safety authority, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), began aligning its testing protocols and policies with European NCAP from 2015 to 2017.

Up until the last decade or so, the main focus for safety authorities was occupant protection through passive design – that is, how well the car copes in the event of a collision.

Improvements in design structures and the extensive use of high-strength steels, advanced materials, structural adhesives and other technologies have all helped greatly reduce the severity of a crash.

Engineers carefully balanced the strength and deformability for the various types of crash modes.

But times are changing quickly as technology continues to move forward rapidly. Not only crash safety bodies but governments around the world are trying to keep pace with advanced new tech that has the ultimate aim of eliminating all car crashes.

Where do we go from here? And where will it all end? Let’s take a look…

Whilst occupant protection continues to evolve, there has been significant focus on ‘active’ safety technologies, which help avoid a collision occurring at all.

One of the first of these was electronic stability control (ESC), which became mandatory in 2008 to achieve the maximum five-star standard from ANCAP.

But today, the list of active safety features required to achieve a top rating is extensive.

Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) alone must function for various scenarios including those for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists and a back-over scenario.

AEB requirements also now extend to interurban (that is, highway speeds) and junction assist, which scans for vehicles entering from the side.

Other requisite systems for five-star endorsement include autonomous emergency steering (AES), lane assist – such as lane keep assist (LKA), lane departure warning (LDW) or active lane support systems (LSS) – and even includes seat belt reminders.

According to ANCAP, approximately 90 per cent of crashes are a result of human error. And key to eliminating these is vehicle autonomy – taking control away from the driver and letting the vehicle manage the situation.

The autonomous classifications range from Level 0, like your basic cruise control systems from the 1990s, up to Level 5 which represents fully autonomous driverless vehicles.

Most vehicles sold in Australia are Level 1, with some more advanced vehicles categorised as Level 2.

Safety standards are already preparing for this and will have to adapt again to capture these new technologies.

In order to move from Level 2 and beyond, the next thing on the development radar (excuse the pun) is vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies. A combination of them both is known as vehicle-to-everything (V2X).

Compatible vehicles are able to share relevant information to each other wirelessly, over the dedicated 802.11p standard or using the cellular 3GPP network.

This can be used for a range of applications such as warning of broken-down vehicles, roadworks coming up or emergency vehicles approaching.

V2I can aid in reducing fuel/energy consumption and congestion by adjusting vehicle speeds in accordance with traffic signal timing.

The advantage of these systems versus radar or camera-based technologies is they can work over several hundred metres and do not rely on a direct line of sight. This way a vehicle can adjust its speed before arriving at the scene rather than relying on the reactive technologies currently used.

With an increasing portion of vehicle control moving from human operators to computers, one of the next big talking points in the industry is a data recording system that captures a history of events much like the black box found in aircraft.

This would play an important part of any litigation and also assist with diagnostics.

It seems safety systems and their regulation are on an increasingly complex path, but the goal is simple – zero fatalities.

The thought of giving up the ability to operate your own vehicle is daunting to many, least not those car enthusiasts clinging onto the manual transmission (guilty).

However, transport is the cornerstone of society, and autonomous vehicles look to provide safe passage and independence for those who need it most.

Those with physical or mental impairments (even self-induced from the night before) will have an alternative to public transport.

Considering ageing populations around the world, rather than take, autonomous vehicles will give control back to many people’s lives.