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The Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies (ACAT) program initiated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had two major overall objectives. These were to develop a standardized Safety Impact Methodology (SIM) tool to evaluate the effectiveness of advanced technologies in avoiding and mitigating specific types of vehicle crashes; and to develop and demonstrate objective tests that are used in the SIM to verify the safety impact of a real system. Honda and Dynamic Research Inc. (DRI) had been developing and applying such SIMs for several years and had a Cooperative Agreement with NHTSA to further develop a SIM in order to determine the feasibility of developing estimates of effectiveness for specific not-yet-deployed safety technologies in the absence of data from real world or field operational tests, and linking it to the results from objective tests.

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.

The Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies (ACAT) program initiated by the National Highway Safety Administration had two major objectives. These were to develop a standardized Safety Impact Methodology (SIM) tool to evaluate the effectiveness of advanced technologies in avoiding and mitigating specific types of vehicle crashes; and to develop and demonstrate objective tests that are used in the SIM to verify the safety impact of a real system. Honda and Dynamic Research Inc. (DRI) have been developing and applying such SIMs for several years and have a Cooperative Agreement with NHTSA to further develop a SIM that provides an estimate of full systems safety benefits at a national level.