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This paper reports on the interim progress of the Honda-DRI ACAT-II program initiated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The objectives of the ACAT-II program were further development of a formalized Safety Impact Methodology (SIM) for estimating the capability of advanced technology applications installed in vehicles to address specific types of motor vehicle crashes, and to evaluate driver acceptance of the technologies. This particular ACAT study extended earlier work by Honda and DRI in the NHTSA ACAT-I program by extending the SIM so as to be able to analyze head-on crashes more completely, and by using the extended SIM to evaluate of a pre-production version of a Honda Head-on Crash Avoidance Assist System (HCAAS).

A prototype safety analysis system has been developed to assess and forecast vehicle safety that can assist vehicle developers integrate various safety technologies into future production vehicles. The prototype system can be used to assess the actual safety in existing vehicles based on fatal accident and vehicle registration data (e.g., US FARS and Polk data); and to estimate the safety in future vehicles based on the estimated effectiveness of candidate passive and active safety technologies (e.g., Curtain Airbags, CMBS) using a systems model with a representative sample of in-depth accident data (e.g., NASS/CDS). Therefore, the prototype system is a useful tool which can be used to estimate the net overall effectiveness of various candidate safety technologies combined, providing a metric which can be used to help optimize the effectiveness of integrated vehicle safety systems.