The US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently discovered that automated collision prevention systems in modern cars have indeed helped reduce the number of crashes.
Statistically, the introduction of automated emergency braking systems – the kind you find in cars like the Ford Mondeo – have reduced rear-end collisions by 40%. Less intrusive systems that only warn the driver of an imminent accident on the other hand reduce collisions by 23%.
This is in line with the theoretical safety advantages to self-driving cars. In the US, ten carmakers have already pledged to make automated braking a standard feature on their models, but haven’t yet set a date for when this might happen.
The same report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety projected that if all cars had the feature as standard in 2013, 700,000 collisions would have been avoided.
In Malaysia, brands such as Mazda and Ford seem to be at the forefront of making this technology available to the mass market. In Thailand, the Mitsubishi Mirage, which is the smallest car it sells in the country, will have automated braking available as an option in 2016.
