Lane Departure Warning, Blind Spot Detection Help Drivers Avoid Trouble
Lane departure warning, a technology designed to address an often-fatal type of crash, is preventing crashes on
The studies are the latest in a series by
Results of the new study indicate that lane departure warning lowers rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities by 11 percent and lowers the rates of injury crashes of the same types by 21 percent. That means that if all passenger vehicles had been equipped with lane departure warning, nearly 85,000 police-reported crashes and more than 55,000 injuries would have been prevented in 2015.
The analysis controlled for driver age, gender, insurance risk level and other factors that could affect the rates of crashes per insured vehicle year.
A simpler analysis that didn't account for driver demographics found that lane departure warning cut the fatal crash rate 86 percent. There weren't enough fatal crashes to include them in a statistical model that controlled for demographics. In the simpler analysis, the rate of all crashes was 18 percent lower for vehicles equipped with the feature, and the rate of injury crashes was 24 percent lower.
"This is the first evidence that lane departure warning is working to prevent crashes of passenger vehicles on
Analyses by HLDI haven't uncovered direct benefits in the form of lower claim rates from lane departure warning. On many vehicles, lane departure warning is bundled with front crash prevention, making it impossible to separate the effects, as the insurance data don't include the type of crash. And on the few vehicles studied that don't bundle the feature, no benefits for lane departure warning have been found (see "Drivers of all ages benefit from
However, a 2015 study of lane departure warning on trucks in
Compared with those results, the new findings of an 11 percent reduction in all relevant crashes and a 21 percent reduction in injury crashes are modest. One reason may be that
Another factor affecting the size of the benefit is that lane departure warning requires an appropriate response from drivers. IIHS researchers recently looked at 631 lane-drift crashes and found that 34 percent of the drivers were physically incapacitated (see "Drivers who drift from lane and crash often dozing or ill,"
The new study included vehicles with optional lane departure warning from six manufacturers:
Cicchino used the same method to examine blind spot detection systems, which provide a visual alert when an adjacent vehicle is in the driver's blind spot. In this case, she focused on crashes in which the vehicles were changing lanes or merging.
Controlling for other factors that can affect crash risk, blind spot detection lowers the rate of all lane-change crashes by 14 percent and the rate of lane-change crashes with injuries by 23 percent. Although only the reduction in crashes of all severities was statistically significant, the effect for injury crashes was consistently in the expected direction for 5 of the 6 manufacturers studied.
"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 says. "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."
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