Over the past couple of years, the Insurance Institute for Highway safety has been expanding its testing of automatic emergency braking systems. It has expanded from just testing car-to-car capabilities to testing car-to-pedestrian, as of 2019. Now it's looking at how these systems work at night. As it turns out, they do quite a bit worse than during the daytime.
This is important for two reasons. First of all, as the organization notes, pedestrian deaths have been on the rise since 2009. And from 2020 to 2021, deaths have risen by 13% to just over 7,300. Of those, 75% occur at night. The second reason is that, as shown by an IIHS study, automatic emergency braking systems with pedestrian detection make a difference in reducing traffic collisions with pedestrians. Though the study also showed the systems weren't making a difference at night.
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