Most fatalities and serious injuries in traffic result from accidents caused by human error. Today, a series of driver assistance functions exist to help avoid or reduce the severity of such accidents (e.g. Autonomous Emergency Braking), while still allowing the driver to interrupt the function at any time. This overriding behavior – mandated by the Wiener convention [1] – is particularly important in the case of an incorrect function activation on the part of the vehicle’s system. Due to this built-in override functionality, driver assistance functions – which typically support the driver in de-escalating a critical situation – cannot help preventing cases where drivers actively target pedestrians with the vehicle (as in recent vehicle ramming attacks). This makes clear the need for active safety functions able to prevent the driver from (intentionally or unintentionally) causing harm to other traffic elements. The function Amok Safety Lock (ASL) was developed as a prototype function to research the possibility of increasing the safety of pedestrians in the case of vehicle misuse. The function ASL looks at the driver’s driving behavior, the predicted vehicle’s motion and the relative positions and motions of pedestrians in the vicinity of the vehicle to identify an imminent collision. If the driver does not act to de-escalate the situation, the function initiates an emergency braking maneuver without the possibility of overriding. Simultaneously, warning signals (horn, front and turn lights) are emitted to alarm the pedestrians nearby. This behavior was confirmed in both simulations and vehicle tests using IAV’s Vehicle-in-the-Loop approach. Due to its unilateral behavior, changes in the legal framework are necessary before such a function can be deployed.