Abstract:

Along with the development of economy and vehicle technology, traffic accidents have some particular characteristics including the high mortality of vulnerable road users and ‘nonstandard groups’ of people, crash incompatibility, high death rate of single-vehicle accidents, and a significant number of accidents caused by drivers’ insufficient perception. The developing trends of active safety technologies and passive safety technologies in terms of each subsystem by analyzing the traffic accident data in China, Europe and the United States since 2000. The main trends of passive safety include protection on vulnerable road users, adaptive passenger protection, crash compatibility and adaptive crashworthiness. The main trends of active safety include vehicle dynamic management and intelligent driving assistant. The comprehensive safety technology integrating the active and passive safety will be an important trend for the development of future vehicles.

Key words: vehicle safety, vehicle crash, traffic accident, developing trend