Lane departure warning, blind spot detection help avoid crashes IIHS

Lane departure warning, blind spot detection help avoid crashes IIHS

Use of lane departure warnings and blind spot detection lowered the risk of crashes in two recent studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Lane departure warnings lowered rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes by 11 percent and lowered the rates of crashes with injuries by 21 percent. That means that if all passenger vehicles had been equipped with the feature, nearly 85,000 police-reported crashes and more than 55,000 injuries would have been prevented in 2015.

One reason the reductions are fairly modest is that U.S. drivers often turn off the lane departure warning, IIHS said. That is where dealers could play a role, in educating customers about the importance of the feature.

–This is the first evidence that lane departure warning is working to prevent crashes of passenger vehicles on U.S. roads,” said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research.

IIHS did a second study that found that blind spot detection lowers the rate of all lane-change crashes by 14 percent and the rate of lane-change crashes with injuries by 23 percent.

–If every passenger vehicle on the road were equipped with blind spot detection as effective as the systems we studied, about 50,000 police-reported crashes a year could be prevented,” Cicchino said.