GM FYI Blog

By Bob Lange
Executive Director, Vehicle Structure & Safety Integration

The federal government’s announcement of plans to require electronic stability control for all U.S. vehicles was barely hours old before a news reporter asked me that most vexing of questions: “What’s next?”

I have a pretty fair idea of where automotive safety technology is heading, and there is some debate about which technology will emerge to be the next safety “it.” The direction being set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is toward crash-avoidance technology — the before in our before, during and after Continuous Safety approach.

I won’t make any predictions. But I am sure that whatever “it” is will fall well short of providing the potential benefit of electronic stability control, what we call StabiliTrak.

The opportunity to reduce the number of highway fatalities by 10,000 a year is huge. And it doesn’t come along every day. So when you hear that ESC could be the most effective safety technology since the safety belt, believe it. It is that promising.

We announced almost two years ago that all of our cars and trucks sold at retail would have StabiliTrak standard by the end of 2010. We saw the potential benefit of StabiliTrak more than a decade ago. Our decision to make it standard was partially based on how effective the early studies showed it could be — especially in avoiding single-vehicle crashes and rollovers.

Because StabiliTrak requires a vehicle to have antilock brakes and traction control, rolling out ESC requires a major change to the chassis or a new vehicle to implement.

As ESC becomes ubiquitous, I don’t see the issues surrounding StabiliTrak that were concerns with antilock brakes 15 years ago. ESC should be completely transparent to customers. It activates very rarely, so I do not think we’re going to see a change in driver behavior or reactions because of it. What we will see is a limited exposure to the loss of vehicle control.

To those who opined that 2010 was a long time off when we made our announcement in early 2005, we had to point out that lead times in the automotive industry made 2010 a lot sooner than turning calendar pages made it seem. Today, 2007 and 2008 are history as far as what safety technology will be ready for what products.

But what about the “what’s next” question?

One of the technology features that StabiliTrak enables is known as panic brake assist. It is in a few of our StabiliTrak-equipped cars today, including the Cadillac SRX. Panic brake assist is basically a computer algorithm that enables the driver to have more brake pressure in a situation where braking is critical without pushing the brake pedal to the floor. The computer decides whether it is a panic braking situation. We will roll that out on all StabiliTrak-equipped vehicles in coming years. There are other safety technologies that ESC systems can enable, but when it comes to protection in a crash or near crash, the most effective technology remains the safety belt.