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Pre-collision systems (PCS) use forward-looking sensors to detect the location and motion of vehicles ahead and provide a sequence of actions to help the driver either avoid striking the rear-end of another vehicle or mitigate the severity of the crash. The actions include driver alerts, amplification of driver braking as distance decreases (dynamic brake support, DBS), and automatic braking if the driver has not acted or has not acted sufficiently (crash imminent braking, CIB). Recent efforts by various organizations have sought to define PCS objective test procedures and test equipment in support of consumer information programs and potential certification. This paper presents results and insights from conducting DBS and CIB tests on two production vehicles sold in the US. Eleven scenarios are used to assess the systems' performance. The two systems' performance shows that commercial systems can be quite different.

This paper provides an analysis of how communication performance between vehicles using Dedicated Short-range Communication (DSRC) devices varies by antenna mounting, vehicle relative positions and orientations, and between receiving devices. DSRC is a wireless technology developed especially for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. A frequency band near 5.9 GHz has been set aside in the US and other countries for exploring safety and other uses for road vehicles. DSRC devices installed onboard vehicles broadcast their location using global navigation space systems (GNSS), speed, heading, and other information. This can be used to study communication performance in many scenarios including: car-following situations, rear-end crash avoidance, oncoming traffic situations, left turn advisory, head-on crash avoidance and do-not-pass warnings.

Forward collision warning (FCW) systems are intended to provide drivers with crash alerts to help them avoid or mitigate rear-end crashes. To facilitate successful deployment of FCW systems, the Ford-GM Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP) developed preliminary minimum functional requirements for FCW systems implemented on light vehicles (passenger cars, light trucks, and vans). This paper summarizes one aspect of the CAMP results: minimum requirements and recommendations for when to present rear-end crash alerts to the driver. These requirements are valid over a set of kinematic conditions that are described, and assume successful tracking and identification of a legitimate crash threat. The results are based on extensive closed-course human factors testing that studied drivers' last-second braking preferences and capabilities. The paper reviews the human factors testing, modeling of results, and the computation of FCW crash alert timing requirements and recommendations.