Studies on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) abound in the academic realm, and sometimes, they produce results that steer counter to conventional reasoning about these newer safety features. Case in point: one study published this year found that some systems can actually lead to more dangerous driving.
For the study, conducted by researchers from universities in the U.S. and Hong Kong, scientists drew on telematics data from an unnamed automaker that gave them access to all sorts of information, even driver attributes such as age and gender. ADAS features were placed into two buckets: less urgent warnings, and highly urgent warnings. Simply put, blind spot detection warning was categorized as "less urgent," while lane departure and forward collision warning fall into the "highly urgent" category.
The data showed that “less urgent” driver assistance systems resulted in a reduction of hard braking events by 6.8%, providing evidence that blind spot warning results in safer driving. On the flip side, the research on “highly urgent” driver assistance warnings found the opposite: vehicles with systems like lane departure and forward collision warning experienced an increase in hard braking events of 5.7%. Keep in mind, these statistics are in respect to cars that have none of the aforementioned driver assistance systems, and the total sample size included 195,743 cars. So, what gives?
The authors of the study suggested drivers with more urgent ADAS feel comfortable driving with less caution, instead relying on the systems to react. Meanwhile, the passive (less urgent) ADAS could be cause for folks to become more cautious and improve their driving behavior. There was a difference in results based on sex, according to the study, too: it found that females were quicker than males to learn reflexively from informative ADAS prompts, and that males exhibited riskier behavior.
Funny enough, though, even with the behavior the study found, both types of ADAS were effective in cutting collision rates versus the cars with no ADAS. It found that forward collision and lane departure reduced collision rates by 15%, while blind-spot monitoring cut them by 19%. So while there might be some shortcomings in the systems that could be improved, the numbers still support having them in place.
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