Pre-Crash Systems (PCS) integrate the features of active and passive safety systems to reduce both crash and injury severity. Upon detection of an impending collision, PCS can provide an early warning to the driver and activate automatic braking to reduce the crash severity for the subject vehicle. PCS can also activate the seatbelt pretensioners prior to impact. This paper identifies the opportunities for injury prevention in crash types for which PCS can be potentially activated. These PCS applicable crash types include rear-end crashes, single vehicle crashes into objects (trees, poles, structures, parked vehicles), and head-on crashes. PCS can benefit the occupants of both the striking and struck vehicle. In this paper, the opportunity for injury reduction in the struck vehicle is also tabulated.
The study is based upon the analysis of approximately 20,000 frontal crash cases extracted from NASS / CDS 1997-2008. Annually, there are an estimated 16,800 seriously injured occupants (MAIS3+) and 2,900 fatalities in PCS applicable crash types. Rear-end crashes were the most frequent crash type followed by object crashes and opposite direction collisions. Annually PCS applicable crash types comprised over one-third of all occupants exposed to frontal crashes. Furthermore, PCS applicable crash types accounted for 50% of all seriously injured occupants and 56% of all fatalities in all frontal crashes annually. Although only 12% of occupants were unbelted, these unbelted occupants accounted for 45% of the serious injuries (MAIS3+) and 57% of the fatalities. Although a similar number of occupants were exposed in the striking and struck vehicle in rear-end crashes, there were double the number of serious injuries yet half the number of fatalities in striking vehicle occupants. This paper identifies the potential population of occupants that are exposed and injured in crash types where there is possibility for PCS intervention. This paper does not present any estimates for benefits of PCS implementation.