Looking forward to potential technological advances in road safety in 2024 and beyond, there are a couple of themes I think will be significant.

The first is that vehicles are getting more and more driver assistance technology onboard, with more coming because of the Vehicle General Safety Regulation – the European directive that establishes various safety requirements for new vehicles, such as automatic lane keeping.

The key thing to bear in mind here is that we've got nearly 40 million vehicles on the UK’s roads, but with around 2m new ones added to the car parc every year. As these vehicles slowly replace older ones, it will take a long time before we see the real impacts of new technology.

eCall systems, which provide data from vehicles that have collisions, have been mandatory in new cars since 2018, so about a third of the vehicles in the network now have it – but that also means that two thirds do not.

Slowly improving safety

There are several reasons behind this. One is because newer, safer cars aren't necessarily bought by people who are more likely to have collisions: younger drivers don't tend to be found in newer cars, for example. 

Another reason is that very few people know about technology such as eCall because they didn’t read about in on page 409 in their car’s 600-page manual. 

Some drivers also seem to get very annoyed with new tech going ‘bong’ at them, or applying their brakes, or not allowing them to change lane when they don't indicate. 

We might not be seeing more active safety prevention of collisions as people are turning this tech off because it's annoying, or badly designed and deployed. The reaction of users to the technology hasn’t yet been explored fully.

I don’t think we’ll have roads full of self-driving cars in my lifetime, because there'll be a long tail of older vehicles sharing the road with self-driving cars. What we will start to see is more technology in vehicles that will have an impact, but again, over time. 

Benefits for all road users

The other important theme to address is ensuring that technology increases safety for all road users. Yes, vehicles are much safer than they were – but that’s mostly true for their occupants, protected by airbags, seatbelt tensioners and a safety cage around the cabin. But if hit by a vehicle, all the safety tech does little or nothing for vulnerable road users. 

Here again, the changing car parc is interesting, as vehicles get heavier because of demand for sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which have more kinetic energy when they crash at the same speed as their counterparts. This is just one more of the many changing factors that affects our understanding of the impact of new safety technology. 

However, the establishment by the DfT of the Road Safety Investigation Branch (RSIB), aligning with the marine, air and rail investigation branches, will help start looking into the areas to focus on. The increased sharing of data from connected vehicles will also help our understanding of how to improve road safety to prepare the way for autonomy.

A Christmas wish

In 2024, I’d like to see more interaction and cooperation between the automotive and road industries. They need to work together: after all, much of the new active safety technology relies on road signs and markings, rather than previous self-contained technology that didn’t need to interact with infrastructure. 

Hence the two industries need to work together to understand each other’s opportunities and constraints.

Andy Graham was in conversation with Craig Thomas