A collection of five carmakers have come together and pledged to implement what the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) considers to be potentially life-saving technology.
According to Reuters, Toyota, GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler Auto, Honda and Volkswagen have agreed to add autonomous emergency braking to their cars by 2022, with extra time granted for overcoming technical obstacles, such as manual gearboxes.
NHTSA Admin Mark Rosekind said : “We’re very excited about this,”claiming around 20-percent of crashed could be prevented with this feature. Do the math. That’s 5 million crashes every year — 20 percent reduction means 1 million less. Those are big numbers.”
The National Transportation Safety Board had previously made their desire for the technology to be available on all vehicles.
Autonomous Emergency Braking systems utilize sensors to detect when you are too close to a following vehicle, and automatically apply the brakes with quicker than human reaction time, to prevent collisions.
Data from 2012 shoes 1705 Americans were killed from rear-end crashes while a further 547,000 were injured. It is claimed this announcement will lead to a drastic fall in those statistics.
Here’s a demonstration of what can happen when an early system goes wrong.
By Mitchell Jones