Thousands of lives saved by ESP systems, claims research
ABOUT 15,000 lives have been saved and just under half a million accidents prevented by Electronic Stability Programs (ESP), says new research.
ESP works by detecting where a car’s front wheels are pointing, and comparing this information with the direction the car is actually travelling in. If it determines the car is not under proper control, anti-lock brakes can be activated on individual wheels, while engine torque is also cut, helping the driver bring things back into line.
While mandatory on all models introduced since 2011, and all new cars sold since late 2014, ESP was first fitted to the 1995 Mercedes S-Class. It came to prominence in the ‘elk test’ of the 1997 Mercedes A-Class (above), which fell over in extreme manoeuvring during Swedish safety assessments. ESP solved the issue, and the system became a standard A-Class feature.
More than 250 million ESP systems (developed by Bosch and Mercedes) have been built by the former to date, with 82 per cent of all new vehicles being fitted with the system globally. It’s estimated up to 80 per cent of all skidding accidents can be prevented by the tech, which calculates steering and vehicle angles 25 times a second.
Bosch board member Harald Kroeger said ESP “has taken road safety to a new level,” and represented “a milestone on the path to our ‘vision zero’ of no more road deaths” – a target shared by various firms and bodies including Transport for London, Volvo, and the European Commission.