Bridging the gap between technology development and market implementation for vehicle safety

With its 375 million road users, mobility and transport is a concern for citizens throughout Europe. Modern society depends on mobility as an efficient transport system is the engine of our economy. The transport sector employs more than 10 million people with expenditure of more than 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Europe. The automotive sector manufactures about 17 million vehicles per year and employs with its suppliers close to 2 million people in Europe, with a turnover of 452 billion Euro world-wide [1]. The automotive telematic market, comprising of sales of platforms and services is experiencing rapid growth in market penetration, and according to some market studies, it will reach an annual revenue as high as 8,5 billion Euro in Europe in 2007, up from 1 billion Euro in 2000. In the year 2001 there have been 1.300.000 accidents in Europe that caused 40.000 fatalities and 1.700.000 injuries, at an estimated cost of 160 billion Euro, or 2% of the GDP. On a personal level, these accident figures translate to one third of us being injured in an accident at some point of our lives. The psychological damage to the victims and their families cannot even be estimated. Thanks largely to the efforts of the industry, vehicles today are inherently safer, cleaner and more recyclable than before. Thanks to improvements in the crash-worthiness of the vehicles, safety belts, ABS and other inventions, the vehicles are now four times safer than in 1970; this has largely contributed to the reducing by 50% the number of deaths in EU15 from 1970, while the traffic volumes have tripled during the same period. But the societal costs of road transport are still far too high, and new goals needed to be set. This is why, in its White Paper "European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to Decide", for the first time the European Commission has set an ambitious target to reduce by half the number of road fatalities by 2010 [2].