Despite years of successful use by leading motor carriers and numerous studies concluding AEB improves safety, this technology is not required for all commercial motor vehicles. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ((IIJA), Pub L. 117-58) will only require AEB on all newly manufactured Class 7/8 by November of 2023. Based on new truck sales data, limiting the installation of AEB to Class 7/8 trucks will potentially exclude over half a million Class 3-6 trucks every year. 

The Truck Safety Coalition has long been NHTSA to set performance standards for this life-saving technology, having our petitioning granted by the agency back in February 2015. The Class 7/8 requirement is a step forward that is long overdue, with thousands of lives lost to unnecessary delay, but more steps are necessary. A requirement on ALL COMMERCIAL MOTOR VEHICLES is desperately needed to take full advantage of this proven technology’s ability to prevent crashes from occurring and drastically reduce the severity of those that do. NHTSA has previously found that AEB systems have an incremental cost to the end-user of $70.80-$316.18. 

Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) technology is a proven highway safety system that saves lives and prevents injuries by applying the brakes if the driver does not respond sufficiently to audio and/or visual warnings. It has been successfully used by leading U.S. trucking companies and there is ample data and research to support its required use. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has recommended repeatedly, including most recently in its 2021-2022 “Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements”, that AEB and other crash avoidance technologies should be standard equipment on all cars and all trucks. 

The NTSB makes this recommendation for good reason: it will reduce the incidence of crashes, their severity, and save lives. Single-unit trucks (a majority of which are likely Class 3-6) injure upwards of 72,000 people a year, and 27 percent of all fatalities in large truck crashes involved a Class 3-6 truck in 2019. Class 3-6 trucks travel on local streets and through neighborhoods every day making millions of deliveries, picking up garbage, and delivering supplies to retail stores and other businesses. Data shows that each day on average, the U.S.P.S. delivers 430 million pieces of mail, and UPS and FedEx deliver 43 million packages. Equipping these trucks with AEB will make neighborhood streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, children, older adults, people in wheelchairs and other vulnerable road users. 

Download our AEB Fact Sheet 

Links to More Information on Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in Large Trucks:

Government

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

Large Truck Fact Sheet 2017

Study on Cost and Weight of Forward-Collision Warning and Automatic Emergency Braking in Large Trucks

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)

The Use of Forward Collision Avoidance Systems to Prevent and Mitigate Rear-End Crashes

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)

Research and Testing to Accelerate the Adoption of Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) Systems in Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMVs)

Transportation Security Administration (TSA)

Vehicle Ramming Attacks: Threat Landscapes, Indicators, and Countermeasures

Federal Register

Grant of petition for rulemaking: Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard; Automatic Emergency Braking; NHTSA-2015-0099

Research on Effectiveness of AEB

AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety

Automatic Emergency Braking Systems: Leveraging Large-Truck Technology and Engineering to Realize Safety Gains

National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)

Optimizing Large Vehicles for Urban Environments: ADAS

SAE International

Effectiveness of a Current Commercial Vehicle Forward Collision Avoidance and Mitigation Systems

UMTRI

Shiny-side Up: Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies That Can Reduce Heavy Truck Crashes

Media

Forbes

Automatic Braking In Trucks Will Lag Cars By Years

Commercial Carrier Journal

Emergency braking an area where trucking can lead 4-wheeler technology

Trailer-BodyBuilders.com

Logistic companies, fleets reporting significant reduction in accidents with collision mitigation, RSC, ESC

Meritor Wabco Collision Mitigation System Improves Safety: Study

Reuters

VW to step up spending on automated truck technology

Deutsche Welle

Automatic brakes stopped Berlin truck during Christmas market attack

TRUCKS.COM

Automatic Emergency Braking – Prime Time for Regulation