February 17, 2022 – Advanced driver assistance features can only make driving safer if drivers trust them enough to use them, and that trust appears likely to wane as vehicles move into the secondhand market, a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows.
“Used car buyers were substantially less likely than new car buyers to know about the advanced driver assistance features present on their vehicles,” says IIHS Senior Research Scientist Ian Reagan, the author of the study. “They were also less likely to be able to describe how those features work, and they had less trust in them. That could translate into less frequent use, causing crash reductions from these systems to wane.”
The results make it clear that buyers of both new and used vehicles need better information about the driver assistance technologies that they’re equipped with.