Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would see automatic emergency braking become a standard feature on all new light passenger vehicles. If adopted, NHTSA says it would save 360 lives and prevent 24,000 crashes each year. The feature uses a forward-looking sensor--usually radar but in some cases a camera--to detect whether a vehicle in front is slowing rapidly, alerting the driver if so and, should it be necessary, activating the brakes to slow the car.

"Today, we take an important step forward to save lives and make our roadways safer for all Americans," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. "Just as lifesaving innovations from previous generations like seat belts and airbags have helped improve safety, requiring automatic emergency braking on cars and trucks would keep all of us safer on our roads."

NHTSA added automatic emergency braking to its list of recommended safety features in 2015. At the time, it started noting the presence or absence of this advanced driver assistance system when determining a car's rating under the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which is aimed at giving consumers safety information about new vehicles.

Automakers started making automatic emergency braking a standard feature before any government mandate. In 2015, 10 manufacturers told NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that they would start including the feature on all their new cars. The following year, another 10 joined the pledge to make the function standard by 2022, bringing nearly all of the auto industry into the agreement.

Analyses of the effect of automatic emergency braking on crash reductions showed that the tech works. A metanalysis in 2015 found a 38 percent decrease in collisions for vehicles that utilized such a system, for instance.

But it's not entirely perfect. NHTSA wants standard automatic emergency braking systems to include pedestrian detection, but a 2019 study by the Automobile Association of America found that higher speeds or low light conditions seriously degraded performance. An overactive emergency braking system is undesirable, too--both Tesla and Honda have been investigated by NHTSA as a result of "phantom braking" complaints, where oversensitive or badly designed systems throw false positives, sometimes causing a crash in the process as the cars brake inappropriately.