Utility vehicle

The failure to maintain adequate safety distance is the cause of many accidents on motorways. In 2022 17,755 accidents involving personal injury on motorways and 23,190 associated driving errors were recorded. Nearly a third of those errors document insufficient safety distance.

Although serious crashes and fire incidents involving buses and coaches are rare, they can have desastrous outcomes when they occur due to the large number of passengers transported in a single vehicle. The German Insurers Accident Research contracted a research project to Trier University in order to investigate into the possibilities to enhance and speed up the evacuation process in coaches. The focus was on accident scenarios, particularly those in which the coach tipped over onto its side.

The aim of the study, which was initiated from the UDV (German Insurers Accident Research), was to estimate the time taken by tired drivers to safely assume control of a vehicle after a level 3 drive and long driving times.

The failure to maintain adequate safety distance is the cause of many accidents on motorways. In 2022 17,755 accidents involving personal injury on motorways and 23,190 associated driving errors were recorded. Nearly a third of those errors document insufficient safety distance.

Automated driving is regarded as the future of mobility. It is expected to make traffic flow more efficiently and reduce the number of road accident victims as well as emissions and traffic jams.

The aim of the study, which was initiated from the UDV (German Insurers Accident Research), was to estimate the time taken by tired drivers to safely assume control of a vehicle after a level 3 drive and long driving times.

More than 10 years ago, the German Insurers Accident Research (Unfallforschung der Versicherer / UDV) assessed the accident risk posed by farm tractors in road traffic and identified typical patterns. Initial assessments of the figures currently reported in the German traffic accident statistics and the insurers’ accident database (UDB) have shown that the occurrence of accidents involving farm tractors has changed during the intervening period.

The Germany-wide analysis carried out by the UDV of over 4,100 streetcar accidents involving injury in the period from 2009 to 2011 showed that around 86 percent of these accidents happened at an intersection or within the sphere of influence of an intersection.

Recreational vehicles (RVs) have enjoyed growing popularity for a number of years in Germany. Not only is the number of these vehicles rising continuously; the number of new registrations is also increasing every year.