Automatic Brakes to Be Part of 5-Star Safety Ratings

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it would update its 5-Star vehicle safety ratings to include automatic emergency braking (AEB) as a recommended safety technology.

The regulator’s rating system provides consumers with information about how safe they are in a vehicle in the event of a crash, with more stars equaling safer cars.

The AEB system, which can prevent rear-end crashes or reduce the impact speed of those crashes by automatically applying the brakes, would be added as a recommended safety technology in all U.S. vehicles beginning with model year 2018, NHTSA said.

The decision to add AEB system as a recommended safety technology is one of a series of steps NHTSA and U.S. Department of Transportation have undertaken to accelerate the spread of crash-avoidance technology.

NHTSA has added electronic stability control, forward collision warning, lane-departure warning and rear view camera systems to its list of “recommended” technologies since 2011.

(Reporting by Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva.)