General Motors partnered with the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute to study the real-world effectiveness of its various available active safety features and found that such systems are “making a statistically significant impact in helping to reduce crashes.”
To find out what kind of impact GM’s own active safety, driver assistance and adaptive lighting technologies are having on driver safety, the U of M compiled data from 3.7 million different GM vehicles from 2013-2017 and compared crash instances involving vehicles with and without active safety features. The automaker says the study “showed that certain features evaluated had an impact in preventing the types of crashes the features were designed to help prevent or mitigate,” and indicates such systems are helping to improve road safety.
Automatic Emergency Braking (or Forward Automatic Braking) with Forward Collision Alert is one of the most impressive technologies, as per the study’s findings, showing the potential to reduce rear-end striking crashes by 46%. A Rear Vision Camera can also raise driver awareness and reduce reverse crashes by 21%. If paired with a Rear Park Assist functionality, Rear Cross Traffic Alert and Reverse Automatic Braking respectively, the camera results in a 38%, 52%, and 81% reduction in backing crashes.
The study also found that Lane Keep Assist with Lane Departure Warning reduced lane departure-related crashes by 20% and Lane Change Alert with Side Blind Zone Alert reduced lane change crashes by 26% in GM vehicles.
The publication of this study’s findings comes not long after GM CEO Mary Barra was quizzed over the company’s lack of standard active safety features on cheaper vehicles, such as those from its Chevrolet brand. Barra responded by saying the automaker wants to have it on more vehicles going forward, but also acknowledged there were some cost challenges involved.
Some entry level models, such as the 2019 Honda Civic, come standard with a suite of up-to-date active safety features and advanced safety technologies. The Honda Sensing package, standard across all Civic trim levels, includes a collision mitigation braking ,adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist and road departure mitigation.
Check out the full GM/University of Michigan study at this link.
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Comments
It’s time for Mary to stop making excuses. Other automakers, like Honda mentioned in the post, manage to do things in vehicles costing less and with higher quality. I love GM; but, I’m sick of the excuses so often made why features aren’t included or why they’re sometimes years behind other automakers.
Blame the UAW. It’s easier to extract work by paying only $18/hr with no guarantee they will have a job the next day rather than $30/hr with a guarantee they will never be fired.
Only greed is keeping GM from incorporating advanced safety measures across all of its vehicle lines. Buy a Honda, and be safer.
If people learned how to drive we wouldnt need 100 safety features – which adds to the cost and wieght of a vehicle and on 5opnof that extra long term costs to maintain ! Gm had it right 70 years ago by saying its not the car normally at fault its the driver ! Why not take some government funding from ntha and insurance companies and stricter penelties and make safer drivers !
Not gonna happen. You can’t force more driver education into a brain and expect the driver to preform with laser precision and faultless coordination.
Simply by giving a driver even more instruction, you’re burdening it with more things to remember and recall; more data for a driver to juggle that demands them to make more judgement calls and decisions that may impact their lives or the lives of others.
GM may have been right 70 years ago, but not even GM would admit that the cars designed and engineered in the 1940’s would carry onward through time to today without any critical safety design changes.
Seat belts were once argued as being too costly to implement into a production car without having to rely on subsidies. It’s been illegal to sell a mass-produced car in NA without them for decades now, and consumers EXPECT cars to have seat belts as standard equipment.
I’m sure there were people like you back then arguing that drivers should be more careful and that they should learn how to drive properly instead of having safety feature like seat belts adding “cost and wieght of a vehicle and on 5opnof that extra long term costs to maintain !”
All these safety technology on this planet, put in these car’s now of days is not going too stop, anybody from getting killed, if you have people out here driving like dam fools. And it’s getting worse ever single day.
At first I found these warning features a bit distracting as the various symbols and sounds initiated themselves … As I got used to them I found them very helpful … You still have to drive carefully ; just use them as extra tools to keep yourself safe ….
Personally I’m against this active “safety” system. I want to write a descriptive essay using https://edubirdie.com/descriptive-essay-writing-service because this stuff smells like a “Black Mirror” movie. It is not good folks, these systems may cause more danger for people.
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