eVALUE –A Test Program for Active Safety Systems

Active safety systems are massively implemented into new vehicle generations and offer a high potential in decreasing road accidents. While testing and rating of the passive safety of vehicles are based on established and accepted methods and programmes, no such are available for active safety of cars or trucks today. Thus it is difficult to assess the performance of those systems for industry, legislation and further stakeholders. In particular, the customer cannot judge about the active safety of different vehicles based on easy-to-understand ratings as they are offered by different new car assessment programmes (NCAPs). This leads to a relatively low awareness of active safety systems and hinders a high market penetration. The main focus of the European research project Testing and Evaluation Methods for ICT-based Safety Systems (eVALUE) is to define objective methods for the assessment of vehicle active safety. The methods are based on relevant traffic scenarios that, according to investigated statistics and databases, represent the majority of accidents, where active safety systems can come into effect. While the project is still on-going, these new and highly needed test methods will allow the assessment of the active safety performance of a vehicle. However, the eVALUE consortium will only define the test methods while the thresholds for the specific values are not specified. This remains the competence of every institution adopting the test methods and actually applying them in order to assess different vehicles. The results which can be generated by applying these methods will increase the public awareness for active safety systems and foster the development within the industry.