In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) completed a multi-year process that led to a new safety standard: all new cars and trucks sold in the United States must include rearview cameras as of May 2018.
The initiative was aimed at preventing backover accidents, which, according to NHTSA, caused an average of 210 fatalities and 15,000 injuries each year. Even worse, the same studies noted that children under five and adults aged 70 or older were disproportionately affected.
We have numerous safety technologies that can reduce accidents in a variety of environments, the same way a rearview camera can. This raises the question: what might come next? Here’s our educated guess, along with all the challenges that might follow. It seems like there is a strong chance that automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems could be next.
