It may be true that some collisions are largely unavoidable due to unfortunate conditions on the road. However, there are car technologies out today that can reduce the amount of damage both cars and people sustain in collisions. This way you will also save money on the need for collision repair later on.
Forward Collision Warning Systems and Collision Damage Reduction
Currently, most commercially-available cars can't avoid collisions for you altogether. However, they can warn you about an imminent crash directly in front of you through Forward Collision Warning systems.
Obviously, the responsibility to actually avoid the collision is completely up to you, but the system can give you advance warning of up to 3 seconds. This makes it so that even if you can't avoid the collision altogether, there's a good chance you could reduce the potential damage to the people and vehicles involved significantly.
Some evidence from statistics shows a reduction in the severity of damages average at about $13,700 for heavy vehicles. This benefit is due to the complete package of reducing the cost of damage repair from collisions as well as benefits to productivity and avoiding injury.
How Forward Collision Systems Work
Advanced warning systems or forward collision systems work by calculating what the "time to contact" is between your vehicle and another based on a number of factors. These factors include the angle, location, and current trajectories of your vehicle and another vehicle. It's often done with cameras and LIDAR, which is like radar only with lasers.
Newer systems can detect potential collisions even when you're the one moving and the car in front of you is staying still. The system can detect when the car in front of you is braking and whether there is a danger of you hitting it as well.
Brake Assist and Forward Collision Systems
Brake assist is a system where the car senses when you're trying to brake hard and overrides your manual control to put maximum pressure on the brake automatically. This system works well with forward collision systems because of how they both work. For example, if a forward collision system recognizes that there's a braking car in front of you and notices that you're braking, the brake assist system can benefit from this information and provide enough braking pressure to keep you from colliding with the other car.
At the very least this will often reduce the amount of collision damage you suffer by reducing what your speed is at when you hit.
Share13 February 2015
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