GM and University of Michigan Find that Safety Tech Prevents Crashes
Photo: GM
General Motors offers an array of driver assistance, headlighting, and safety features in its vehicles. Recently, GM ran a study to determine the effectiveness of such features, and it turns out that many of the features help lower the amount of crashes.
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GM and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute partnered together on the study. They looked at 3.7 million GM vehicles, which were comprised of 20 models between 2013 and 2017. By having access to the police report crash databases in 10 different states, they were able to evaluate a total of 15 systems.
What the study found
Many of the features in the study were found to have a statistically significant impact when it came to preventing the specific crashes that they’re supposed to mitigate or prevent. For example, the Automatic Emergency Braking with Forward Collision Alert lowered the rear-end striking crashes by an impressive 46%.
Other findings are that the Lane Change Alert with Side Blind Zone Alert produced a 26% reduction in lane change crashes. The Reverse Automatic Braking, the Rear Cross Traffic Alert, the Rear Park Assist, and the Rear Vision Camera reduced the backing crashes by 81%, 52%, 38%, and 21% respectively.
Lane Departure-related crashes lowered by 20%, thanks to the Lane Keep Assist with Lane Departure Warning. The High-Intensity Discharge headlights and the Intellibeam headlights lowered the nighttime animal, pedestrian, and bicyclist crashes by 21% and 35% respectively. However, when offered together, they were able to lower the crashes by 49%.
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Based on the study, it does in fact appear that GM technology is helping reduce crashes. As such, you can have more peace of mind when driving on the road.
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