Evaluation of the real-world effectiveness of vehicle safety technologies

Research completed previously for the UCSR program has successfully evaluated the effectiveness of a number of vehicle safety technologies including driver and side airbags, anti-lock braking systems, electronic stability control, reversing cameras and most recently AEB and anti-whiplash seats. To facilitate these evaluations, methodology based on induced exposure designs has been developed providing the most robust statistical analysis outcomes along with protocols for assembly of the data to best serve the evaluation designs. More recently with the development of the primary safety index, methods of evaluating crash avoidance technologies via direct risk methods have also become available. For secondary safety technologies, extensions of the methodology used to calculate the UCSRs have been employed, enhanced through access to detailed injury outcomes data from Victoria.

Ability to retrospectively evaluate new vehicle safety technology through the analysis of real-world crash data relies on a sufficient number of the vehicles with the technology existing in the registered fleet and being involved in crashes. MUARC currently monitors the exposure of new vehicle safety technologies in the fleet through the matching of vehicle specification data from RedBook in Australia and through the Right Car information in New Zealand to the crash and registration data in the VSRG research database.