Reinsurance giant Swiss Re, as part of a partnership with automotive tech firm Luminar, has recently completed a milestone in the safety performance assessment of Luminar’s LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and software driving system.
Last year, the two companies entered into a partnership to advance assisted driving and improve safety while reducing the costs of consumer adoption.
The reinsurer recently tested a test vehicle equipped with Luminar LiDAR and software driving system, using the Swiss Re AV Risk Assessment Framework’s risk-based vehicle testing protocol.
Swiss Re exposed a test vehicle equipped with Luminar technology as well as the same vehicle without the Luminar technology to Swiss Re’s vehicle testing protocol in a closed testing facility without real-life traffic
According to the results, the Luminar system-equipped vehicle is expected to avoid up to 25% more collisions than the same vehicle without the Luminar equipment and it is expected to enhance the mitigation power by up to 29%.
Compared to the two best vehicles in Swiss Re’s benchmark the difference in expected frequency is up to 27%, while in mitigation power it is up to 40%
As a result, this means that the Luminar-equipped vehicle is expected to avoid more collisions as well as decrease the impact of collisions when they happen.
According to Swiss Re, the assessment involved: exposing the Vehicle Under Test (VUT) to collision scenarios within a controlled testing environment, collecting vehicle response data and converting it into safety performance scores, and then benchmarking the performance of the VUT against related and appropriately selected vehicles and driving systems in the market.
Interestingly, the tests also included scenarios covering car-to-car accidents (car-to-car rear end collisions, intersection scenarios and head-on collision), car-to-vulnerable road user accidents (accidents involving pedestrians and bicycles), car-to-motorbike accidents as well as accidents involving a car and an object on the road.
It is important to highlight, that a total of 35 accident scenarios and almost 800 individual tests – using different scenario settings – were conducted on the Luminar-equipped vehicle.
