Technologies in vehicles continue to evolve and provide added elements of safety on the road. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reviewed recent literature that showed advanced driver assistance systems are likely to reduce crashes, injuries and deaths that involve passenger vehicles.

“The updated statistical estimates show that equipping cars with ADAS could help save lives,” said Austin M. Svancara, a lifespan developmental psychology graduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and collaborator on the paper. “We hope that, as these lifesaving technologies become more readily available, there will be greater public awareness of these systems and their functionality. Consumers should consider the benefits of these technologies as they look to purchase new vehicles.”

Researchers looked at the injury and death rates of passenger vehicle crashes where an ADAS, such as forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, lane keeping assistance and blind spot monitoring systems, could have been beneficial. The integration of ADAS in passenger vehicles—specifically cars, trucks, vans and SUVs—are estimated to have the potential to prevent 40% of all passenger-vehicle crashes, 37% of injuries that occur in passenger-vehicle crashes and 29% of deaths in crashes that involve passenger vehicles.

Svancara was a research intern at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety over the summer, which gave him the opportunity to conduct the statistical analysis research and collaborate on the paper.