Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies (ACAT) Program – Final Report of the GM-VTTI BackingCrash Countermeasures Project

The Backing crash Countermeasures project, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies (ACAT) program, developed a basic methodological framework and computer‐based simulation model to estimate the effectiveness and potential safety benefits of various backing crash countermeasure systems. The project was led by the General Motors Corporation (GM) with support from Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), and involved a series of tasks which included: characterizing backing crashes, assembling a research test bed for use within the project, developing a series of objective testing procedures to characterize backing crash countermeasure system performance, and developing and exercising a computer‐based Safety Impacting Methodology (SIM) model used to estimate the effectiveness and potential safety benefits of the prototype backing crash countermeasure system evaluated. The SIM was designed with an emphasis on three key characteristics: accuracy and precision of estimates, modularity, and flexibility. Despite the availability of prior work and extensive data collection within the project, many limitations remain. While the SIM serves as a useful tool to bring together data from a wide array of research into a unified simulation, the limitations identified constrain its usefulness in predicting potential real world safety benefits of emerging backing crash avoidance systems. Benefit estimates from the SIM should be considered preliminary indications of backing crash countermeasure performance useful in studying the interaction of technology with driver behavior at various stages along the crash timeline.