road safety

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European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

Cars, road safety / /

do that here, too —

In 2026, Euro NCAP points will be deducted if some controls aren’t physical.

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man pushing red triangle warning car button

Enlarge / A car’s hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.

Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we’d happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy “piano black” trim that’s been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry’s overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.

“The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes,” said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP’s director of strategic development.

“New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving,” he said.

Now, Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features, like the European Union’s eCall feature.

Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel. (Ferrari also has its turn signals on the steering wheel, but Ferrari does not appear in Euro NCAP’s database so probably doesn’t care.)

Euro NCAP is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mandate carmakers use physical controls for those functions. But a five-star safety score from Euro NCAP is a strong selling point, similar to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s coveted Top Safety Pick program here in the US, and it’s likely this pressure will be effective. Perhaps someone should start bugging IIHS to do the same.

European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls Read More »

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New data shows which states were more deadly for pedestrians in 2023

Cars, pedestrian deaths, road safety / /

please watch out —

Preliminary road-safety data for the first half of 2023 has been published.

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New data shows which states were more deadly for pedestrians in 2023

Getty Images

American pedestrians were at slightly less risk of being killed by a car last year. The Governors Highway Safety Association has just published a preliminary analysis of road safety data for the first half of 2023, and it has found a “modest” reduction in pedestrian fatalities, which have been all too high in recent years.

As with last year’s study, the GHSA found some states were much safer than others. In fact, 29 states and the District of Columbia recorded declines in the number of pedestrian traffic deaths for the first half of 2023, with Vermont recording no pedestrian deaths at all.

In total, the GHSA estimates that 3,373 pedestrians died on US roads between January and June 2023, which it says is a 4 percent decrease compared to the first six months of 2022. However, the report points out that even though this year saw a small decline, the number of pedestrian deaths for the first half of 2023 is 14 percent higher than the same time period in 2019.

“After witnessing pedestrian deaths rise each year, it’s encouraging to finally see a small decrease,” said Jonathan Adkins, GSHA’s CEO. “But the fact remains that 18 people go for a walk every day and don’t return home due to preventable crashes. The only acceptable number of traffic deaths is zero. We must seize on this recent momentum and continue to push for a safer system that protects people on foot from the dangerous driving behaviors that are all too prevalent.”

GHSA

The largest overall reduction in pedestrian deaths in absolute numbers occurred in California, which saw 66 fewer pedestrians die between January and June 2023 compared to the same six months in 2022. Colorado saw the greatest increase in real numbers, with 19 additional pedestrians dying versus the first half of 2022.

When expressed as a percentage change in pedestrian deaths, less populous states jump out—as well as Vermont, which recorded no pedestrian deaths during the time period and therefore saw a 100 percent decrease, and Nebraska, which also logged a 70 percent reduction. Meanwhile, Idaho saw a 150 percent increase in pedestrian deaths due to an additional six deaths.

When the GHSA data is normalized to population size—in this case, the rate of pedestrian deaths per 100,000 inhabitants—an interesting picture emerges. Eighteen states have a rate of pedestrian deaths above 1.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, and almost all of them are in the Sun Belt.

GHSA

Here, we can see the influence of both the natural and built environments at work—the report points out that these states have both warmer climates, which prompt more people to walk, and urban areas that were developed after the ascendency of the automobile, meaning more car-centric urban design. New Mexico fares worst of all on this measure, with a pedestrian death rate of 1.99 per 100,000 inhabitants during the first half of 2023, far higher than the nationwide average of 1.01 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

The GHSA report has some recommendations to make things safer for our most vulnerable road users. More mid-block crossing infrastructure would help, as only 22 percent of pedestrian deaths occurred at crossings in 2021. Lower speed limits are lifesavers, too, and already some US cities have moved to a default 20 mph (32 km/h) limit. Better street lighting would also help this problem, as a disproportionate number of crashes occur in poor light conditions.

We can expect the GHSA report for the full year to be published sometime around June.

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What happens when you trigger a car’s automated emergency stopping?

advanced driver assistance systems, Cars, Evergreen, Features, road safety / /
screen grab from a Mercedes training video; illustration of sleeping driver

Mercedes-Benz

Most car crashes begin and end in a few seconds. That’s plenty of time to get in a tiny micro-nap while driving. The famous asleep-at-the-wheel film scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation, where Clark Griswold goes off to slumberland for 72 seconds while piloting the Wagon Queen Family Truckster (a paragon of automotive virtue but lacking any advanced driver safety systems), might be a comical look at this prospect. But if Clark were in the real world, he and his family would likely have been injured or killed—or they could have caused similar un-funny consequences for other motorists or pedestrians.

There’s plenty of real-world news on the topic right now. Early in 2023, the Automobile Association of America’s Foundation for Traffic Safety published a study estimating that 16–21 percent of all fatal vehicle crashes reported to police involve drowsy driving.

With the road fatality numbers in the US hovering close to 38,000 over the past few years, that means between 6,080 and 7,980 road deaths are linked to drowsy drivers. Further research by the AAA’s Foundation finds that drivers likely under-report drowsiness in all car crashes. Nodding off while driving is as dangerous as—and potentially more dangerous than—driving drunk. And while drunk-driving figures have decreased between 1991 and 2021, the opposite is true for drowsy driving.

Nissan

Automakers have not been unaware of the problem, either. As long ago as 2007, manufacturers like Volvo began offering drowsiness-detection systems that monitored the driver, though in a simpler way than what’s seen in the leading systems of today. They sensed the velocities of inputs to steering, throttle, and brakes. Some even used a camera aimed at the driver to discern if drivers were becoming inattentive, including drooping their head or simply averting their view from the straight-ahead.

These systems chime a warning and project a visual alert on the dashboard asking if the driver wants to take a break, often with the universal symbol for wakefulness—a coffee cup—appearing in the instrument cluster. Many new cars today still have this feature. And to be sure, it was then, is now, and forever will be a beneficial and effective method of alerting drivers to their drowsiness.

But a level beyond the above audible and visual cues has changed this landscape of blunting the upward trend of drowsy driving. As Level-2, semi-autonomous capabilities emerge in medium- and even lower-priced automobiles, these features also allow cars and SUVs to take control of the vehicle should the vehicle determine that the driver has become inattentive or incapacitated.

On some vehicles, like this Mercedes, you can select the sensitivity of the drowsy driver program (“Attention Assist” in this case) to have a lower or higher threshold for activation.

Enlarge / On some vehicles, like this Mercedes, you can select the sensitivity of the drowsy driver program (“Attention Assist” in this case) to have a lower or higher threshold for activation.

Jim Resnick

Because all the pieces of a vehicle-control puzzle are already on board, enabling a system to take over from an inattentive driver is a matter of programming—extensive programming, of course, but all the critical pieces of hardware are often already there:

  • Selective braking from adaptive cruise control and stability control
  • Self-steering functions of lane-keeping and lane-centering
  • A cellular telematics network.

It’s a lengthy programming exercise that can take control of a vehicle in a simplified way, but not before three forms of human stimuli are triggered to wake up a drowsy driver: sight, sound, and a physical prompt.

This is all great in theory and in a digital vacuum, but I wanted to explore what occurs inside a car that has determined that the driver is no longer actually driving. The Infiniti QX60 and Mercedes EQE 350 have such emergency stop capabilities; I recently tested both.

What happens when you trigger a car’s automated emergency stopping? Read More »