Case studies and vehicle wrecks
He has seen hundreds of accidents, dead bodies, injured people, and smashed-up cars. He has been called up, jumped in his car, turned on the blue light, and given first aid. He has talked to distraught victims, taken details of crashed vehicles, and photographed skid marks. And yet Andreas Georgi is not a doctor, or a policeman, paramedic, or reporter – he’s an accident researcher.
Fully equipped with ESP: 4,000 fewer fatalities
Georgi now no longer drives around in a GIDAS car, however. Instead, he works in an office at the CR location of Schwieberdingen, where, together with his team, he has been meticulously analyzing the GIDAS database for three years. The results are of considerable benefit to Bosch when developing new vehicle safety systems. “With this database, we can calculate precisely how many accidents would have been less severe, or even avoided altogether, had a specific system been used,” Georgi explains.
The best example of this is the Electronic Stability Program (ESP). As accident experts have demonstrated conclusively, about 80 percent of all accidents involving skidding vehicles could be avoided if all cars were equipped with ESP. “For Europe,” Andreas Georgi explains, “this would reduce the number of fatalities by about 4,000 and the number of injured persons by about 95,000” – each and every year.
According to Reiner Marchthaler, head of the CR/AEV1 research group responsible for these studies, the most important aspect is that the database helps to identify the areas in which safety can still be significantly improved: “We are systematically searching for blank spots on the map of vehicle safety,” he says. An example of such a blank spot is the insufficient degree to which motorcycles are equipped with the ABS anti-lock brake system. “If all motorbikes on the market came with ABS, a quarter of all accidents could be prevented,” says Marchthaler. In Germany alone, this would mean 200 lives saved every year.
Cars explode only in the movies
The analyses also help to debunk a few popular myths: for example, the assumption that there are more traffic accident victims in winter than in summer. “The opposite is true,” Georgi says. “In winter, people drive more slowly, and there are fewer bicycles on the roads.” Or the myth of the exploding cars we all know from the movies: “There is a burning car in only one in every 1,000 accidents,” according to Georgi. “And even then, the car does not blow up. It starts burning slowly so that there is still time to help trapped or injured people…”
To make precise calculations, an enormous amount of collected data is required. Several million facts and figures in addition to thousands of case studies are available to Bosch accident researchers in their work – and the precision of the details is truly astounding…
