Front crash prevention systems aren’t as good at preventing crashes with large trucks and motorcycles as they are crashes with cars, according to two new studies from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Most front crash prevention systems include forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking (AEB). Forward collision warning alerts the driver when a rear-end crash is imminent, and AEB automatically slams on the brakes if the driver fails to respond in time.
Today’s systems reduce rear-end crash rates with medium or heavy trucks by 38 percent and rear-end crash rates with motorcycles by 41 percent, compared with a 53 percent reduction in rear-end crash rates with other passenger vehicles, an IIHS study of more than 160,000 crashes found. The same discrepancy is seen with the surrogate vehicle targets that IIHS and other organizations use to evaluate system performance, another study demonstrated.
“These reductions are impressive for all vehicle types, but the safety benefits could be even larger if front crash prevention systems were as good at mitigating and preventing crashes with big trucks and motorcycles as they are with cars,” said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president of research.
The IIHS believe such systems could prevent an additional 5,500 crashes a year with medium or heavy trucks and another 500 crashes with motorcycles.
The organization said motorcycles and large trucks present unique risks, along with being hard for other drivers to see, motorcycles don’t have a steel frame surrounding and protecting the rider the way cars do. At the other end of the spectrum, large trucks are so massive that when a passenger vehicle hits one, it is more likely to be fatal to the people inside the passenger vehicle.
