Oz Experts Tout New Pedestrian-Safety Technologies

A new generation of vehicle technologies holds the key to radically improving Australian pedestrian security, safety organizations say as they mark the second anniversary of the United Nations' Decade of Action for Road Safety.

The University of Adelaide’s Center for Automotive Safety Research, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program and the Australasian College of Road Safety, conduct a joint pedestrian-safety demonstration at the center’s vehicle-testing laboratory as part of UN Global Road Safety Week.

The demonstration shows how new technologies can alert the driver to an imminent crash.

Deputy Director Robert Anderson says the center for more than a decade has been testing vehicle designs for their ability to protect pedestrians and cyclists and providing the data to ANCAP for its car safety-rating program.

“It’s clear that our combined efforts will continue to prevent many deaths and injuries across Australia for many years into the future,” Anderson says in a statement.

“Now there is a new generation of safety technologies emerging that assist the driver to reduce collision-impact speeds and even prevent some accidents from occurring.”

Anderson says the center is developing the capability to test these technologies so it can assess and rate their effectiveness and, together with ANCAP, promote their adoption and uptake in new cars. The first of these, he says, is autonomous emergency braking.

Of Australia's annual road deaths, pedestrians represent about 180, or 13%. Globally, this stands at about 25% or 270,000 lives.

“The fast adoption of new technologies like AEB could see the road toll cut in half by 2020, and pedestrian deaths and injuries substantially reduced as part of this,” ANCAP CEO Nicholas Clarke says.

“We're already seeing the benefits of AEB in Europe and the U.S., where manufacturers are including AEB as standard on many more models than here in Australia.

“Real-world data suggests AEB can reduce crashes up to 27%, and ANCAP would like to see this life-saving technology become a mandatory requirement for all new vehicles sold in our region.”