Abstract
To make road traffic more safe, one can either turn to the surroundings, the drivers or the automotive technology. Especially the latter has the advantage that with improved automotive technology even weaknesses of the other two aspects (e.g. driver is not concentrated or the driveway is unclear or confusing) can be compensated. Therefore this aspect is of particular importance for increasing traffic safety. In my presentation I will give an overview about upto- date ECS in the market, their installation rates in Germany and their potential to prevent accidents.
To use this potential, the still poor equipment rate of vehicles with these systems has to be increased, while on the other hand the original safety level of vehicles has to be maintained over their whole lifetime.
To achieve the latter, the inspection of electronically controlled safety functions (further on referred to as ECS) using specific test methods is included in the German Periodical Technical Inspection (further on referred to as PTI) since April 2006. To counteract the safety decrease over the vehicles lifetime, especially in the area of ECS, FSD was founded in 2004. Today the inspection methods developed by FSD are a mandatory part of the PTI for vehicles first registered in Germany in April 2006 or later. The experiences from the first five years have shown that there is a need to use vehicle interfaces to increase both efficiency and effectiveness. This technology is ready for rollout and will be presented here with several examples.
Since the introduction of inspection of electronically controlled safety functions in 2006, the inspection bodies have detected a vast number of failures of these systems. With the introduction of the PTI-Adapter 21 as a means of PTI of ECS, this way is continued consequently - in line with the EC policy orientations on road safety 2011-2020 and the "VISION ZERO".
Keywords Automotive intelligence, electronically controlled safety functions (ECS), German Periodical Technical Inspection (PTI), PTI-Adapter 21