In recent years, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has expanded the testing of automatic emergency braking systems. It has expanded from just car-to-car capability testing to car-to-pedestrian testing as of 2019. Now we are looking at how these systems work at night. It turns out they do a lot worse than during the day.
This is important for two reasons. First of all, as the organization notes, the number of pedestrian deaths has been rising since 2009. And from 2020 to 2021, the number of deaths has increased by 13% to just over 7,300. 75% of these occur at night. The second reason is that, as shown by an IIHS study, automatic emergency braking systems with pedestrian detection make a difference in reducing traffic collisions with pedestrians. Although the study also showed that the systems made no difference at night.
The reason for this, after this series of tests, seems to be that the systems are just not particularly good at detecting pedestrians after the sun goes down. The test involved the use of adult mannequins who either crossed the street or walked parallel to the street. Children’s mannequins, used in daylight tests, were excluded because of the very low fatality rate among children at night (good news, Elon! -BH.). Each situation was driven with the car at two speeds (12 and 25 mph for crossroads and 25 and 37 mph for parallel) and with headlights on low and high. The organization tested 23 midsize sedans, SUVs and pickup trucks. In daylight, 19 of them received the highest two ratings from Superior or Advanced. Overnight that dropped to just 11, less than half. Four cars, the Chevy Malibu, Honda Pilot, Nissan Altima and Toyota Tacoma, performed so poorly that they did not receive a score.
The toppers, Superior, were the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Nissan Pathfinder, Toyota Camry and Toyota Highlander. The Pathfinder even managed to avoid a collision with a pedestrian in all situations. The Advanced recipients were the Honda Accord, Hyundai Palisade, Hyundai Sonata, Nissan Frontier, Nissan Murano, Subaru Ascent and Subaru Outback.
The good news is that there are systems that work well. Also, once the IIHS starts regular testing of safety features, automakers tend to make improvements to perform well on them. Examples include the organization’s small overlapping frontal crash tests and headlight tests.
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