Are Lane Departure Features Effective?

If you take a look across the whole scope of the technology that’s being invested into modern cars, there are a lot of features out there that are really cool to take a look at. Some of them are very complex as we’ve even seen the likes of cars that drive themselves, however, it might be some of the simpler features that you might want to keep an eye on because some of these things are even going so far as saving lives. The one feature that we’re going to take a look at today is as lane departure, basically an add-on for your vehicle that will alert the driver via some sort of beeping or seat vibration if they’re gliding out of their lane and into another.

One of the studies conducted by the IIHS shows substantial evidence to prove that “lane departure warning lowers rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities by 11 percent and lowers the rates of injury crashes of the same types by 21 percent. That means that if all passenger vehicles had been equipped with lane departure warning, nearly 85,000 police-reported crashes and more than 55,000 injuries would have been prevented in 2015.” This was conducted while controlling for things like age, gender, and insurance risk level. Furthermore, a simpler study that didn’t account for those controls showed that “lane departure warning cut the fatal crash rate 86 percent.”

If you take the study for fact, I think that it really proves that there is a substantial amount of merit in such a system. This technology comes in at a really good time where, even though it’s not legally allowed, people tend to like to look at their cell phones more than the road sometimes. We’re not saying that if you have something like this that you should participate in such activity but since it seems to be pretty hard to get some people to put down their distractions, maybe something like this could help save lives.