Don’t rely solely on technology to make it safer to back up your car, the American Automobile Association warns.
Tests show that technology fails to prevent crashes with children half of the time — and hardly ever avoids colliding with an oncoming car.
— an announcement from AAA Northeast
“Our tests show that reverse automatic emergency braking [AEB] has clear benefits,” said Alec Slatky, managing director of public and government affairs for AAA Northeast. “But it’s no substitute for an attentive driver.”
Backing unsafely is a serious issue: From 2018-22, more than 33,000 crashes across Connecticut listed “backing” as the vehicle maneuver, according to the UConn Crash Data Repository. Over 2,400 of those crashes resulted in injury and 10 resulted in a fatality.
Reverse automatic emergency braking is a system designed to automatically activate a car’s brakes when it detects a potential collision behind the car. Reverse AEB has proven to be effective in scenarios when a vehicle might back into another stationary vehicle and is now available in approximately 30% of new cars.
Image from an AAA video
If this were an actual child, you wouldn’t want to be the one behind the wheel. Don’t rely on automatic emergency braking alone — it’s not smarter than an alert driver.
To better understand how the technology performs in more challenging scenarios, AAA tested a set of new vehicles equipped with reverse AEB systems designed to stop a vehicle before it backs up into an object or person, or gets struck from the side by a vehicle. The results:
• Child (video here): When the test vehicle was backing out of a parking space into the path of a pedestrian target designed to be representative of a typical 7-year-old, the reverse AEB systems automatically applied the brakes in 75% of tests and prevented a collision in 50% of tests.
• Cross traffic (video here): When the test vehicle was backing out of a parking space into the path of an oncoming vehicle, the reverse AEB systems automatically applied the brakes in 65% of tests and prevented a collision in 2.5% of tests.
What to Do
Given the results, AAA recommends the following tips for drivers to keep themselves and other road users safe when leaving a parking spot:
• Stay engaged: Drivers should not rely solely on reverse AEB to prevent collisions, but use backup cameras and their own two eyes to enhance their awareness of their surroundings. Check behind and around your vehicle before you get in the car.
• Back up slowly: Drivers should back up cautiously when their side vision is obstructed and allow the technology to “see” past the obstruction to detect cross traffic, giving the system more time to apply the brakes and prevent a collision.
• Pull through: If possible, pull through a space in a parking lot so that you can exit the spot moving forward.