Impacts of Connected Vehicle Technology on Automated Vehicle Safety

Connected vehicle technologies have a promising role in advancing vehicle safety, but just how much of an impact can connected vehicles have on driver safety? This study uses crash and near-crash events from the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study (SHRP2 NDS) to reconstruct crash events so that the benefit of line-of-sight (LOS) systems and connected vehicle technologies (CVT) can be compared. The benefits of CVT over LOS systems includes additional reaction time before a predicted crash, as well as a lower deceleration value needed to prevent a crash. These values were then used to predict the probability of severe injury for any crashes that could occur. This work acts as a baseline effort to determine the potential safety benefits of CVT-enabled systems over line-of-sight technologies alone.