February 4, 2022 – Automatic emergency braking (AEB) with pedestrian detection – those heavily advertised systems that stop a car from hitting a pedestrian even if the driver doesn’t hit the brakes fast enough – work well, according to one of America’s leading auto safety groups. They work well, that is, in the daytime.
Then comes the damning sentence: “However, when the researchers looked only at pedestrian crashes that occurred at night on roads without streetlights, there was no difference in crash risk for vehicles with and without pedestrian AEB.”
The conclusion comes from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in a new report. The group plans to launch a new round of testing to improve the auto industry’s approach to preventing pedestrian crashes.
