Safety Features Gain Widespread Acceptance

According to a nonprofit group study, most drivers of vehicles with crash-avoidance systems now keep the features turned on, a sign of acceptance of the technology to increase safety.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety survey found that nine out of 10 drivers with access to lane-departure warning and prevention systems use them all the time, and seven out of 10 with visual warnings for exceeding speed limits keep those features turned on.

The traffic safety group said lane-departure features have the potential to prevent nearly a quarter of fatal crashes of passenger vehicles but have to date not significantly impacted insurance claims and reported collisions as have forward collision warnings and automatic emergency braking. 

It believes that’s because front-to-rear crashes are far more frequent than side, head-on, and road-departure ones that lane-departure features figure in. At the same time, many drivers may have also initially kept the lane-departure systems turned off to avoid their alerts. “By and large, automakers have solved that problem,” the institute says in its report.

One industry change that has apparently greatly increased use of the systems is that haptic alerts, such as seat and steering wheel vibrations, are more common now than audible alerts or are offered as an option that the driver selects, based on higher activation rates for vehicles that feature haptic alerts.

The percentage of time that the studied safety systems are kept turned on has dramatically increased since a similar study was conducted eight years ago, IIHS said.

“The results reflect a combination of better designs and a growing acceptance of crash avoidance systems, more generally,” said IIHS Research Scientist Aimee Cox, the study’s lead author. “The new designs make the feature a little harder to turn off and a lot less annoying for the driver.”