Safety benefits from features like automatic emergency braking, lane departure prevention and high-beam assist stack up as multiple systems are bundled together and updated versions deliver better results, a new study from the Highway Loss Data Institute has shown.
“These technologies are awesome,” said Matt Moore, chief insurance operations officer at HLDI and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “As they improve and become more common, we are seeing compounding crash reductions.”
To better understand this evolution, HLDI’s latest study examined the impact of the advanced driver assistance systems offered on 2015-23 Mazda vehicles, comparing six feature bundles and four other stand-alone systems.
The most basic bundle consisted of a single feature – front automatic emergency braking (AEB), which in all these vehicles included forward collision warning. The most comprehensive bundle included front AEB with pedestrian detection, adaptive cruise control, high-beam assist, lane departure warning, lane departure prevention, rear AEB, and Driver Attention Alert – a feature designed to detect when the driver is fatigued or distracted.
The most basic bundle was associated with a 13% reduction in property damage liability (PDL) claim rates and a 9% reduction in bodily injury liability (BIL) claim rates. The study found benefits grew with the addition of each new technology, and the most comprehensive bundle was linked to a 39% drop in PDL claim rates and a 21% fall in BIL claim rates.
