Crash reduction potential of connected vehicles in South Australia

The purpose of the present research was to estimate the safety benefits of connected vehicle technology in Australian conditions over and above what could be provided by autonomous emergency braking (AEB). Central to the methodology employed to achieve this was the application of a collision avoidance system model to simulations of real world crashes investigated by CASR to determine the change in impact speed. The collision avoidance system model was used for this project to not only model sensor based AEB systems but comparable connected vehicles systems to determine the additional crash reduction potential of connected vehicles above that provided by AEB. A literature review was conducted and found that connected vehicles have many safety related applications that can address the South Australian crash types of right angle, right turn, rear end, hit pedestrian, side swipe and head on, though technical difficulties exist for hit pedestrian and head on crashes. Importantly, crash types that are poorly addressed by AEB, right angle and right turn crashes and certain pedestrian crashes, can be addressed by connected vehicle applications. It was found that connected vehicle technology could reduce injury and fatal crashes by an additional 16 to 21 percentage points and 12 to 17 percentage points respectively above the percentage reduction of sensor based AEB. If hit pedestrian or head on crashes cannot be addressed by connected vehicles the additional reduction is 14 to 18 percentage points and 7 to 12 percentage points for injury and fatal crashes respectively. The potential of connected vehicles to reduce crashes in South Australia is therefore considerable and the uptake of such technology should be encouraged in ways that are shown to be cost effective.