Current passive safety standards have already achieved a very high level of occupant protection. This is confirmed year by year through declining numbers of traffic related fatalities. This trend is assumed to continue because more and more vehicles on the road are designed to fulfill strong safety requirements especially in high speed crashes.

In order to further improve frontal crash protection active safety systems like automatic braking systems are introduced to the market. These systems are designed to mitigate the crash severity and they are expected to have a great impact in further reducing the number of injured persons in traffic accidents.

This paper will discuss a method to estimate field effectiveness of an automatic braking system in combination with an adaptive restraint system in frontal crashes.

The method is based on the German In-Depth Accident Study GIDAS. Accidents are clustered in relevant car-to-car scenarios. In each scenario the effect of an automatic braking system and of an adaptive restraint system on the injury outcome is analyzed. The sum of all the injury risks is weighted with the relevance of each scenario and the expected value of MAIS3+ injured persons is calculated with and without the integrated safety system.