Cars In The Future : Pedestrian Protection
Return to Cars In The FuturePedestrian protection is an urgent issue that manufacturers need to address. The majority of vehicles on the road today could be improved upon vastly and it is important that there is a strong encouragement for manufacturers to work towards this aim.
On 17th December 2003, Directive 2003/102/EC relating to the protection of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users before, and in the event of, a collision was introduced to amend Directive 70/156/EEC.
Its aim was to increase the protection of pedestrians by implementing phase 1 of a set of tests based upon those specified by EEVC WG10 & 17, although with lessened performance criterion. All new vehicles will have to pass phase 1 of these pedestrian tests by 1st October 2005 and all new registrations of existing models by 2012.
As part of this Directive, a feasibility test was also conducted to evaluate to what length manufacturers would be able to comply with the full test criterion defined by the EEVC. If a strong argument were put forward proving that manufacturers would not be able to design vehicles to comply, then active safety systems would be evaluated to assess whether they would be able to make up the difference in estimated casualty savings as a result of relaxing the tests recommended by EEVC WG 17. TRL conducted the feasibility study and suggested a relaxed set of testing standards that were judged to be feasible for the industry.
After negotiation with industry, the EU proposed a regulation which would incorporate all the present requirements of phase 1 and revised requirements for phase II based on the feasibility study. The main proposals of the draft Regulation are summarised as:
a) a first phase set of test requirements (phase I) will apply to all new types of vehicles as from 1st October 2005 and to all new vehicles placed on the market after 31 December 2012
b) a second phase of tests (phase II), based on the results of the comprehensive study carried out into the feasibility of the original requirements, will apply to all new types of vehicles from 1st September 2010 and to all new vehicles by 2015
c) the active safety system, brake assist, will be required in all new vehicles as from 1 July 2008
d) the use of new systems, such as collision avoidance, will be recognised as alternatives.
The two ways to encourage manufacturers to dedicate more resources towards the protection are through consumer demand and setting high crash test standards that are relevant to the real world.
The setting of relevant crash test standards is important, and it is disappointing that a negotiated agreement will involve a level of active safety, which reflects a level of assumed accident avoidance rather injury mitigation.
RoSPA’s detailed comments throughout the EU consultation on pedestrian protection can be found at:
http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/consultations/2005/pedestrian_protection.pdf
http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/consultations/2004/pedestrian_protection.pdf
http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/consultations/2001/pedestrian_protection.pdf
The setting of active safety standards to specify an actual figure of casualty reduction is an interesting precedent, since the figure will be affected in future by external forces, such as any reduction in accident rates due to other road safety initiatives. This is especially true in countries where there is much road safety improvement to be had in order to achieve the same safety records of Sweden, The UK, and The Netherlands.
With the draft Regulation in its current state, further work now needs to look at the effectiveness of the pedestrian protection Regulation in the future, as it has raised as many issues as it has addressed.
a) How will it be confirmed that the relaxed protection offered by the bonnet will attain the casualty reductions predicted?
HIC is not a linear scale, and testing to a HIC of 1700 (A HIC of 1000 and above is generally assumed to be unsurvivable in other tests) may not result in any significant predictable casualty reductions.
b) Of the tests that were omitted from legislation, what monitoring will take place?
How will the results of these tests be evaluated? What will be done to ensure that the results of these tests will not, and do not, progressively worsen?
c) Can the results of the monitoring be made public or made available for scrutiny by an independent research organisation?
Is there further scope for developing and expanding upon the amount of consumer feedback to help drive forward the technology, in lieu of high test standards?
d) How will the effectiveness of the different manufacturers braking systems be ensured?
A vehicle’s overall braking deceleration also depends upon the vehicle design. Simply by having an active safety system, it does not necessarily mean that the vehicle will be able to stop in a certain distance from a certain speed. This is a dangerous assumption to make in legislation designed to save lives.
Improving the consumer knowledge of the pedestrian protection scores is an important issue, and ways of spreading consumer knowledge is discussed in a later section. Pedestrian protection is important and it is hoped that manufacturers will start to make more reference to it in advertising literature now that some have achieved the maximum EuroNCAP rating of four stars.
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