Skip to main content

Mercedes auto-braking gets first class rating

Thatcham, Britain’s leading insurance-related automotive research centre, has given top marks to the self-braking system on Mercedes latest C-Class car saying it will provide major benefits to road safety and motorists’ insurance premiums. During testing for the Euro NCAP rating, the braking system on the latest avoided collisions at speeds of up to 40km/h (25mph) by detecting an object in its path and bringing the vehicle to a halt without any driver input. To date many autonomous emergency braking (AEB)
September 25, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
Thatcham, Britain’s leading insurance-related automotive research centre, has given top marks to the self-braking system on 1685 Mercedes latest C-Class car saying it will provide major benefits to road safety and motorists’ insurance premiums. During testing for the 6437 Euro NCAP rating, the braking system on the latest model avoided collisions at speeds of up to 40km/h (25mph) by detecting an object in its path and bringing the vehicle to a halt without any driver input.

To date many autonomous emergency braking (AEB) systems have only been able to avoid collisions at around half the speed achieved by the new Mercedes technology. Thatcham says 17 vehicle manufacturers offer AEB and in the UK 7% of new cars now on sale have AEB as standard, while 17% have it as an option.

Thatcham is backing insurance industry calls for a government-funded incentive for buyers to select new vehicles with AEB.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • 'No lack of political drive' on ITS
    June 11, 2012
    This issue of ITS International contains a feature article based on interviews with leading figures of the ITS associations of the United States, Europe, Japan and Malaysia. A key point made is the importance of political leadership or policy direction in driving take up and implementation of ITS technology. This industry actually need not complain of a lack of drive on the part of politicians, or so it seems from other projects reported in this issue. True, the US would welcome a new transport bill and the
  • ZF TRW demonstrates semi-automated highway driving assist system
    July 2, 2015
    ZF TRW has demonstrated its semi-automated driving capabilities at a test track event in Berlin, Germany. The vehicle has a 'Highway Driving Assist feature which can enable automatic steering, braking and acceleration for highway speeds above 40 kph. The demonstration vehicle integrates ZF TRW's AC1000 radar and S-Cam 3 video camera sensor together with its electrically powered steering belt drive (EPS BD) and electronic stability control EBC 460 – the combination of adaptive cruise control (ACC) and lan
  • The benefits of combining enforcement and traffic management
    February 27, 2013
    Jason Barnes considers how combining enforcement equipment with other traffic management technologies might benefit our future – if only the will were really in place to do so. During the ITS World Congress in Vienna in October last year, Navtech Radar and Vysion­ics ITS announced a strategic partnership that would combine the expertise of Navtech in millimetre-wave wide-area surveillance technology with Vysionics’ machine vision-based automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and average speed measurement
  • Counting the environmental costs of ITS deployment
    October 29, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest thinking about calculating the benefits associated with the environmental side of ITS schemes. The penny is dropping that some environmental costs “are being shifted outside the traditional bounds of evaluation methods” for ITS-based road transport projects, according to researchers at the UK University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies.