Real life safety benefits of increasing brake deceleration in car-to-pedestrian accidents: Simulation of Vacuum Emergency Braking

•This study quantifies real-life benefits of a Vacuum Emergency Braking (VEB) system.•We simulated VEB on 526 collisions between passenger car fronts and pedestrians.•VEB reduces pedestrian fatalities by 80–87% and all collisions by 68–82%.•VEB is up to 28% more effective than standard automated emergency braking (AEB).•VEB could save about 24,000 more fatalities globally compared to AEB alone. The objective of this study is to predict the real-life benefits, namely the number of injuries avoided rather than the reduction in impact speed, offered by a Vacuum Emergency Brake (VEB) added to a pedestrian automated emergency braking (AEB) system. We achieve this through the virtual simulation of simplified mathematical models of a system which incorporates expected future advances in technology, such as a wide sensor field of view, and reductions in the time needed for detection, classification, and brake pressure build up. The German In-Depth Accident Study database and the related Pre Crash Matrix, both released in the beginning of 2016, were used for this study and resulted in a final sample of 526 collisions between passenger car fronts and pedestrians. Weight factors were calculated for both simulation model and injury risk curves to make the data representative of Germany as a whole. The accident data was used with a hypothetical AEB system in a simulation model, and injury risk was calculated from the new impact speed using injury risk curves to generate new situations using real accidents. Adding a VEB to a car with pedestrian AEB decreased pedestrian casualties by an additional 8–22%, depending on system setting and injury level, over the AEB-only system. The overall decrease in fatalities was 80–87%, an improvement of 8%. Collision avoidance was improved by 14–28%. VEB with a maximum deceleration in the middle of the modelled performance range has an effectiveness similar to that of an “early activation” system, where the AEB is triggered as early as 2 s before collision. VEB may therefore offer a substantial increase in performance without increasing false positive rates, which earlier AEB activation does. Most collisions and injuries can be avoided when AEB is supplemented by the high performance VEB; remaining cases are characterised by high pedestrian walking speed and late visibility due to view obstructions. VEB is effective in all analysed accident scenarios.