Commercial Connected Vehicle Test Procedure Development and Test Results – Blind Spot Warning/Lane Change Warning

This report is one of four documenting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA’s) test track research performed to support development of objective test procedures to evaluate the safety applications of commercial vehicles with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) equipment. The primary focus of this research was on developing the test procedures, with a secondary goal of evaluating the performance of the prototype V2V safety applications. Objective test procedures were developed to evaluate a range of safety applications including intersection movement assist (IMA), blind spot warning/lane change warning (BSW/LCW), forward collision warning (FCW), and emergency electronic brake light (EEBL) warning. This report documents the BSW/LCW test procedures and the results of testing commercial vehicles with the developed procedures. The prototype V2V equipment was observed to be capable of tracking potential BSW/LCW threats, but occasionally the equipment would not recognize that a vehicle was in the V2V equipment determined blind spot warning zone due to the equipment’s error in estimating the lateral range between the vehicles. The V2V equipment determined blind zone was different for each side of the vehicle evaluated in this study (shorter on right side). When the turn signals were activated, the blind zone was extended by a time based on the closing speed of the approaching vehicle. The BSW/LCW test procedures are generally well developed, but the blind zone definition for commercial vehicles/tractor-trailers combinations needs to be further refined.