The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has outlined the life-saving benefits of current collision avoidance systems and recommends that they become standard on all new vehicles. Including both passenger and commercial vehicles. They recommend a stepped process to the standardization requirement, beginning with collision warning systems and working into autonomous emergency braking.
The NTSB is asking the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop tests and standards in order to rate the performance of those collision avoidance systems and add those tests to the 5-Star crash rating system. This would be similar to how the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rates these systems in their “Plus” system, marking the difference between a “Top Safety Pick” and a “TSP+” vehicle.
To go with the recommendations, the NTSB issued a Safety Alert for consumers and fleet owners to urge them to consider vehicles with collision warning and mitigation systems. That report is titled The Use of Forward Collision Avoidance Systems to Prevent and Mitigate Rear-end Crashes and can be found here (PDF).
According to the NTSB, only 4 out of 684 passenger vehicle models in 2014 included a complete forward collision avoidance system as a standard feature. When these systems are offered as options, they are often bundled with other non-safety features, making the overall package more expensive.
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