Nothing makes you feel quite as stupid as running into something when you're backing up.
[NOISE] It doesn't account for a ton of injuries and fatalities, but it does account for a lot of expenses in body shops.
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[SOUND] Now technology to keep you out of trouble in back-up collision situations comes in basically three flavors.
The first of which is going to be this area of alerts.
You can get a beep or a blink or even something rumbling under your **** these days.
All of these tied typically to ultrasound or radar sensors in the back bumper that was the original form anyway, going back some 15 years now.
They don't tell you much they beep or vibrate more vibrantly as you get closer.
But, it's hard to equate that to, A certain distance and then more recently over time, these same sensors have crept around the side of the bumper as well as part of either blind spot detection or cross traffic collision detection.
Like when you're coming out of a blind spot or backing out of a driveway into traffic But this gets us to the next layer that a lot of folks feel a lot more confident of and that's this area of visual technologies.
Rear cameras.
This is one that is so fundamentally palatable that they are going to become required in all new US cars as of May 1, 2018.
And are gradually starting to become common in the overall fleet because so many cars have turned over since the advent of the camera.
Almost all offer some simple distance guidelines.
Many offer dynamic trajectory prediction as you move the wheel.
And a few even help you by visualizing the mass and priority of what you're about to back into.
[SOUND] More recently, we've seen surround view cameras.
Now, they don't necessarily add to your back up view, but they do give you more context of what's around the sides of the back of your car.
And that can be very useful depending on the situation.
Then the final tier of this thing, the one that is the holy grail, as with so many things in cars today, is driver assistance, or complete collision prevention when you're backing up Now, this is the sort of reverse sibling of forward collision prevention which is becoming somewhat common in cars today.
The idea here is to simply put on the breaks if you are going to fail to, because you either didn't listen to the beeps, didn't look at the camera, or just not a very good driver Here's the problem with these backup collision technologies.
They're really rare.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tallies that only about 5% of new 2018 cars even offer backup collison prevention.
And less than 1% come with this form of automatic braking standard.
Okay some bottom line numbers.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that all these combined These alerts as well as prevention technologies seem to have reduced the number of reported back up collisions by nearly 80%.
That's pretty profound, and much better than a study a few years ago by Edmonds looking at national highway traffic safety administration data that found while back up camera presence in new cars had gone up 112% Back up accident injuries were only going down about 8%.
Clearly the trend line that we're seeing is that more and more technologies are available on new cars, both to alert you and to help you.
But almost as important is they've been around long enough so their penetration rate in the existing fleet of a quarter billion cars in the US
