Active safety systems are massively implemented into new vehicle generations and offer a high potential in decreasing road accidents. While testing and rating of the passive safety of vehicles are based on established and accepted methods and programmes, no such are available for active safety of cars or trucks today. Thus it is difficult to assess the performance of those systems for industry, legislation and further stakeholders. In particular, the customer cannot judge about the active safety of different vehicles based on easy-to-understand ratings as they are offered by different NCAP programmes. This leads to a relatively low awareness of active safety systems and hinders a high market penetration.

The main focus of the European research project "Testing and Evaluation Methods for ICT-based Safety Systems (eVALUE)" is to define objective methods for the assessment of active safety systems. The methods are based on relevant traffic scenarios that, according to investigated statistics and databases, represent the majority of accidents, where active safety systems can come into effect. The considered systems are chosen based on market availability and penetration, e.g. ACC, Lane Keeping Assistant or ESC. Both the systems as well as the scenarios are clustered into four different domains, each being addressed with distinctive test procedures.

In the end, this new and highly needed test programme will allow the assessment of the overall safety performance of a vehicle with respect to active safety systems. However, the eVALUE consortium will only define the test methods while the thresholds for the specific values are not specified. This remains the competence of every institution adopting the test methods and actually applying them in order to assess different vehicles. The later results of the programme will increase the public awareness for active safety systems and foster the development within the industry.