Latest study finds AEB systems improving over time

In January 2025 the Partnership for Analytics Research in Traffic Safety (PARTS), a partnership between automakers and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), released the results of its second study — the largest government-automaker study to date about the real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems in passenger vehicles.

The study showed that automatic emergency braking continues to improve as it cuts rear-end crashes in half. It also found a 9 per cent reduction in single-vehicle frontal crashes with non-motorists for vehicles equipped with pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems.

This latest study follows PARTS' initial study and more than doubles the number of vehicle models included, adding three additional vehicle segments, three additional states, and three new model years. In this new study, automobile manufacturers submitted vehicle data for approximately 98 million vehicles—168 different vehicle models from 2015 to 2023 were included.

In addition, NHTSA supplied data for more than 21.1 million police-reported crashes to facilitate analysis. The MITRE Corporation, an independent and not-for-profit organization, linked and analysed the data sources.

After linking the crash data with vehicle data supplied by auto manufacturers, more than 2.1 million crash-involved vehicles were relevant to the ADAS features and part of the analysis.