The research program PROMETHEUS aims at improving road safety, traffic flow, comfort of road users, with less impact on the environment. For that, 23 functions have been envisaged. Among them, 14 are directly linked to safety. One of the tasks of the PRO-GEN Safety Group has been to estimate the potential efficiency of these PROMETHEUS functions. The work was carried out in different countries. An assessment of the safety effects of these functions has been made by INRETS, sponsored by RENAULT. We used for this study, a sample of 3200 police reports, nationally representative of the injury-producing accidents occurred in 1989. We tried to answer two questions:​

• What are the driver needs in information and assistance from a safety point of view? 17 main needs have been detected from the police reports. The accidents would have been probably avoided if these needs had been completely satisfied.
• What is the efficiency of each PROMETHEUS func tion, when a driver need is identified? It is difficult to answer this question in so far as the practical features of the functions are not well known. So we used theoretical descriptions of them.

Conclusions are drawn about the main driver needs from a safety point of view, and about the evaluation of potential efficiency of some functions, which aim at assisting the driver in his task. But there are some limits in this research according to the assumptions made:​

• all things being equal:​ the results will not be canceled out by side-effects,
• all technical problems will be solved.

These assumptions are theoretical, so the results must be used mainly in order to hierarchize the safety effects of the PROMETHEUS functions.