Re-Inventing Safety: Do Technologies Offer Opportunities for Meeting Future Safety Needs?

From the beginning of the twenty-first century, the state-of-the-art in motor vehicle safety has been going through significant changes. More and more in-vehicle technologies are finding their way into production vehicles. Some of these are capable of automatically applying corrective measures to overcome the deficiencies in driving performance of many drivers. Other advanced technologies that are becoming available today warn the drivers of imminent crash situations and assist them in taking corrective actions. Many others could reduce the severity of crashes when they do occur and yet others use technologies that could prepare the drivers to minimize their potential injuries when crashes are unavoidable. The obvious question is whether these would make a significant impact on the safety problems that exist in the fleet and if they are indeed beneficial. Also, how would it be possible to facilitate the deployment of those beneficial technologies fleet-wide? This paper describes the various issues involved in using advanced technologies for safety countermeasure development and briefly describes a research program that is being developed at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that is intended to assess the potential of advanced technologies in reducing crashes, injuries and deaths.