A Test Programme for Active Vehicle Safety - Detailed Discussion of the eVALUE Testing Protocols for Longitudinal and Stability Functionality

Active safety functions are massively implemented into new vehicle generations and offer a high potential in decreasing road accidents. While testing and rating of passive vehicle safety are based on established and accepted methods and programmes, no test programme is available for active vehicle safety today. Thus, it is difficult to assess the performance of those functions for industry, legislation and further stakeholders. In particular, the end customer cannot judge active safety of different vehicles based on easy-to-understand ratings as they are offered by different NCAP programmes for passive safety. In the authors' opinion, this leads to a relatively low awareness of active safety functions and hinders a higher market penetration. From January 2008 until December 2010, the European research project eVALUE has been working on objective testing and evaluation methods for active safety functions. According to investigated statistics and databases, critical and accident-prone driving situations have been identified that represent the majority of accidents, where active safety functions can come into effect. The methods are mainly based on physical testing of the full vehicle and do not take into account the influence of a single function, but rather the response of the vehicle as such. Intensive physical testing and application of the test protocols was performed in order to validate and improve the methods proposed by the consortium. Another important topic concerns indicators, which show potential to assess the safety benefit by different active safety functions. Here, a major challenge was given by the lack of required input data, i.e. detailed accident statistics. A first set of indicators has been identified and proposed by the project consortium for further investigation. The proposed new and highly needed test programme allows a first assessment of the overall safety performance potential of a vehicle with respect to active safety. However, the eVALUE consortium only defined the test methods while thresholds for specific indicator values and the derivation of final quantitative overall test results are not specified. This is left to the competence of every institution adopting the test methods and actually applying them in order to assess different vehicles. The authors believe that results gained from the programme will increase the public awareness for active safety functions and foster the development within the industry. However, the project partners also identified and expressed additional research need beyond the scope of the project, e.g. regarding accident statistics and driver behaviour models.