If all passenger vehicles had been equipped with lane departure warning, a technology designed to help prevent drivers from unintentionally straying from their lanes and running off the road or colliding with another vehicle, nearly 85,000 police-reported crashes and more than 55,000 injuries would have been prevented in 2015. The warning system lowered rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities by 11 percent and lowered the rates of injury crashes of the same types by 21 percent.
And blind spot detection systems, which provide a visual alert when an adjacent vehicle is in the driver’s blind spot, lowered the rate of all lane-change crashes by 14 percent and the rate of lane-change crashes with injuries by 23 percent.
Those are the main findings of new studies on crash avoidance systems released earlier this month by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry.
"This is the first evidence that lane departure warning is working to prevent crashes of passenger vehicles on U.S. roads," Jessica Cicchino, the institute’s vice president for research, said in a statement. "Given the large number of fatal crashes that involve unintentional lane departures, technology aimed at preventing them has the potential to save a lot of lives."
The group noted that a 2015 study of lane departure warning on trucks in U.S. fleets found the technology cut the rate of relevant crashes nearly in half, and a study of Volvo cars in Sweden found a reduction of relevant injury crashes of 53 percent. One reason the new findings, which are more modest, could be attributed to the fact that U.S. drivers of passenger vehicles frequently turn off lane departure warning, the report noted, highlighting the importance of driver accountability.
"Blind spot detection systems work by providing additional information to the driver. It's still up to the driver to pay attention to that information and use it to make decisions," Cicchino said. “That said, if every passenger vehicle on the road were equipped with blind spot detection as effective as the systems we studied, about 50,000 police-reported crashes a year could be prevented.”
The institute's two new studies are the latest in a series that evaluate different crash avoidance features by looking at data from police-reported crashes. Previous studies by the institute found that front crash prevention with autobrake cuts the rate of front-to-rear crashes in half and that rearview cameras can prevent about 1 in 6 backing crashes.
To read the full report, which includes new research about how teens drivers use their turn signals more frequently when their vehicles are equipped with lane departure warning systems, click here.
