What is Autonomous Emergency Braking or AEB?
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What is Autonomous Emergency Braking or AEB?

What is Autonomous Emergency Braking or AEB?

AEB works by using radar to measure the distance to any vehicle ahead and then react if that distance suddenly shortens.

AEB is a system that makes your car better and safer for the driver than you are, so it's a shame it's not standard on every new car sold.

Once upon a time, a few smart engineers invented the anti-lock braking system (ABS) and the world was damn impressed with them because they saved many lives and even more panel damage thanks to a system that allowed you to apply the brakes as hard as you like to have them not blocked and sent you into a skid.

ABS was the acronym for car safety and eventually became mandatory on every new car sold (it has since been joined by ESP - Electronic Stability Program - at smart/useful/life-saving rates).

The problem with ABS, of course, was that it still required you, a slightly lethargic and sometimes idiotic person, to step on the brake pedal so the computers could do their smart job and stop you.

Now, finally, car companies have improved this system by creating AEB. 

What does AEB mean? Autonomous Emergency Braking, Automated Emergency Braking, or simply Automated Emergency Braking. There are also a few brand terms like "brake support" or "brake assist" that add to the confusion. 

This system is a little piece of genius that notices when you're not doing your job fast enough with the stop pedal and does it for you. Not only that, it does it so well that on some vehicles it prevents rear-end crashes at speeds up to 60 km/h.

You can almost hear the insurance companies singing "Hallelujah" (because rear-end collisions are the most common, in about 80 percent of all collisions, and therefore the most expensive accidents on our roads). Indeed, some of them now offer discounts on car insurance with AEB installed.

How does autonomous emergency braking work and which vehicles have AEB?

Many modern cars have been equipped with various forms of radar for many years, and they are mainly used for things like active cruise control. By constantly measuring the distance between you and the car ahead—using radar, lasers, or both—they can adjust your car's speed so you don't have to constantly turn your cruise control on and off.

Unsurprisingly, the AEB system, introduced by Volvo in 2009, uses these radar systems to measure the distance to any vehicle in front of you, and then reacts if that distance suddenly starts to decrease at a high speed - usually because the object in front of you suddenly stopped or will stop soon.

Different car companies, of course, use different methods, such as Subaru, which integrates AEB into its EyeSight system, which instead uses cameras to create XNUMXD images of the world around your car.

Being computer controlled, these systems can react faster than you, so before you even soak up your typical one-second human reaction time, they put on the brakes. And it does it, thanks to good old ABS technology, with maximum power.

The car's central processing unit keeps track of whether you have disengaged the accelerator and braked yourself, of course, so it does not always intervene before you, but if you are not fast enough to stop the accident, it will.

There are several companies that offer AEB as standard on their entry level vehicles.

In some situations, especially when driving around the city, it can be a little annoying when the car panics unnecessarily, but it's worth putting up with it, because you never know when it can be really very useful.

Early systems only promised to save your bacon at speeds up to 30 km/h, but advances in technology have been rapid and now 60 km/h is fairly common.

So, if it's so good, it should be standard on all machines?

Well, you might think so, and people like ANCAP are pushing for it to be standard on all cars - like ABS, ESP and traction control are now in Australia - but that's far from the case, which is hard to justify.

A few years ago, Volkswagen launched its tiny Up city car with AEB as standard for a starting price of $13,990, which shows it can't be that expensive. This makes it particularly puzzling that AEB is not standard on all Volkswagen vehicles. While you can get it for free on the small Tiguan SUV, you will have to pay for it on other models.

There are a few companies that offer AEB as standard on their entry-level vehicles - the Mazda3 and CX-5 and the Skoda Octavia - but for most brands, you'll need to buy higher-spec models to install it in your car.

And, of course, you want it. Car companies are aware of this and may use it as a temptation to offer you a more expensive option.

The only thing that seems to make a difference is legislation, although it's a handy marketing tool for those like Mazda who decide to make it standard equipment, as it should be.

Should AEB be standard on all new cars sold in Australia? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

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