Safety Technology has evolved significantly over the last decades. The technological progress, based on the continuous advances in vehicle crash worthiness, restraint systems and active safety functions have made traffic safer than ever before. Latest development has led to a sharp increase in the equipment rates for advanced surrounding sensors, so that onboard surrounding sensors such as camera, radar and lidar sensors have become standard equipment in modern vehicles. Surrounding sensors can provide safety critical information to a vehicle and are thus a pre-requisite for new integrated safety functions such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW) or Emergency Brake Assist (EBA). What if vehicles could communicate with each other and create a network for safety critical information in traffic? What if my vehicle gets realtime information on sudden braking maneuvers 500 meters ahead? What if a vehicle camera detects a cyclist approaching at an urban intersection and shares the cyclist position information with other vehicles? What if vehicles share their mass, velocity and position before a crash to optimize the strategy of airbag deployment? Wouldn`t all this open a new dimension of safety in future traffic – Safety 2.0?

This paper promotes cooperative safety as a new approach based on the exchange of safety critical information in traffic. The underlying thesis is that cooperative safety would dramatically increase the safety for a large number of traffic participants, including vehicles without on-board surrounding sensors and vulnerable road users (VRUs) like children, pedestrians and cyclists.