Aerial view of red SUV emergency braking to avoid car crash.
Most new vehicles sold today either come with or offer optional driver-assist safety features that are engineered to reduce collisions and, in turn, injuries and fatalities. But are they working?
The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) recently looked into nearly six million insured vehicle years worth of insurance claims on four BMW vehicles from the 2013-2017 model years equipped with crash avoidance technologies to determine the extent to which they are effective. The IIHS looked at insurance claim data under collision (damage to the insured driver’s vehicle), property damage (damage to another vehicle), and injury liability coverage (injuries to other people caused by the driver).
HLDI analysts compared claims data regarding four BMW driver-assist system packages that included two or more of the following: forward collision warning, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, front cross-traffic alert, and lane centering. The Institute determined that a combination of frontal crash prevention and adaptive cruise control proved to reduce the frequency of property damage liability and bodily injury liability claims considerably.
However, adding lane centering, included with BMW’s semi-autonomous Driving Assistance Plus package, had little effect on claims. Having forward collision and lane departure warning systems without an automatic emergency braking function, actually increased claims slightly.
“The crash claim frequency reductions for BMW’s Driving Assistance package are the largest we’ve seen from advanced driver assistance systems, which suggests crash avoidance may be delivering bigger benefits as the technology improves,” says Matt Moore, senior vice president of HLDI. “The lane centering that comes in the ‘plus’ package doesn’t seem to augment these benefits. That may be because the system is only intended for use on freeways, which are comparatively safer than other roads, and only works when the driver switches it on.”
Specifically, HLDI found that bundling forward collision warning, lane departure warning, and automatic emergency braking reduced the frequency of collision claims by five percent, with an 11 percent drop in property damage claims, and a 16 percent reduction in the frequency of bodily injury claims.
BMW’s Driving Assistance package, which includes upgraded versions of those features and adds adaptive cruise control, was determined to cut collision claim rates by a not particularly significant six percent, but reduced property damage claims by 27 percent, and bodily injury claim rates by 37 percent. Adding a lane centering feature and front cross-traffic alert to the package was found to not offer any significant reduction in claims frequency.
Of note, BMW’s most basic driver assist package offered on the model years studied, which pairs forward collision and lane departure warning systems, but without automatic emergency braking, was responsible for a two percent increase in the frequency of collision claims, a five percent boost in property damage claims, and an 11 percent jump in bodily injury claims. HLDI says these results are not statistically significant, however, and they contradicted the Institute’s previous studies of similar systems from other automakers.
In earlier reports posted by HLDI’s related entity, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), forward collision warning/auto-braking systems were predicted to reduce the number of front-to-rear crashes by 50 percent, and prevent injuries when such collisions are unavoidable by 56 percent. Lane departure warning was expected to reduce the occurrence of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes by 11 percent.
Though it didn’t post specific predictive data regarding lane-centering technology, the IIHS found the system’s overall performance to vary by model, with some behaving erratically in certain situations. Traversing hills can be a challenge as an LDK system would be unable to read the markers on the other side of the crest and will either become “confused” and drift, or will disengage. The IIHS reports some systems can have a problem keeping the car centered in a lane through sharper curves.
While HLDI’s study shows that choosing a vehicle that comes with advanced driver assist systems can indeed help motorists avoid crashes, don’t expect having them to save any money on your auto insurance premiums. Insurers aren’t offering discounts for adding the latest high-tech safety features, as they have in the past for cars with airbags and antilock brakes. That’s largely because the requisite sensors and cameras embedded into a vehicle’s bumpers are expensive to replace if the car is wrecked. While repairing a smashed bumper on a typical car can run from $300 to $700, a damaged bumper that’s fitted with safety-system sensors can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500 to fix.
