Car and Driver
Eric Tingwall
November 2018
The kick-drum thump of a harmless 30-mph shunt into an inflatable faux car rouses the same visceral remorse as a real car crash. The stomach knots with nausea. Mortification burns deep in every muscle. Within seconds, the brain catalogs the near trauma under Things That Should Not Be Repeated, right next to beer pong played with Captain Morgan.
Against our instincts, we keep taking runs at the balloon car. We nudge, punch, and plow into the generic air-filled VolksÂwagen again and again and again, not unlike American drivers, who, in 2016, drove into the back ends of other vehicles 2.4 million times. The rear-end collision is America's favorite way to bend sheetmetal, accounting for nearly one-third of all crashes.
But for every hit in our testing, there are several more kamikaze runs where the test car shudders to a halt just inches from the half-a-car punching bag. This is the work of automated emergency braking (AEB), which can detect an imminent rear-end collision and apply the brakes to mitigate or prevent the impact. Twenty automakers, whose products account for 99 percent of all new-vehicle sales in the U.S., have agreed to equip their full lineups of cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks with AEB by 2022. But you don't have to wait. AEB is already ubiquitous in new vehicles at every price point, either as standard or optional equipment, and the data suggests that it's working as intended. A 2016 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study found that vehicles equipped with forward-collision warning (an audible, visual, and/or vibrating alert given when the system detects a hazard ahead) and AEB were involved in 39 percent fewer rear-end crashes than vehicles without the technologies.
More...
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/safety-features-automatic-braking-system-tested-explained
