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The market penetration surveys have provided important insights into the state-of play concerning vehicle-safety systems in Germany. The surveys have confirmed that some building blocks are widely penetrated or almost ubiquitous in the vehicle fleet (e.g. airbags, ESC), whereas advanced systems (e.g. emergency braking) are at the beginning of penetrating the fleet. The combination of system equipment and socio-demographic/geographic indicators has revealed that the presence of systems on the road (fleet km) is higher than the equipment suggests, because there is already a rational incentive that large equipment is most beneficial for vehicles with high annual mileage. Taken together in a temporal perspective, the surveys point at the growing intelligence of and in the vehicles. One can also recognise the penetration pattern following the innovation cascade where new systems are introduced as options in upper class segments, usually bundled in packages. Over time, innovation seeps through to the volume segments [18]. Vehicle-safety systems are experience goods. Acknowledging that some of the vehicle -safety systems can be interpreted as automation Level 1 s or 2 systems, users can collect valuable experience on how to drive assisted by such systems.

Automated driving will provide many kinds of benefits - some direct and some indirect. The benefits originate at the individual level, from changes in the behaviour of drivers and travellers with regard to driving and mobility, ending up with benefits at the social level via changes in the whole transport system and society, where many of the current planning and operations paradigms are likely to be transformed by automated driving. There may also be disbenefits, particularly at a social level, for example in intensity of travel which could result in additional congestion and increased use of natural resources. There may also be unintended consequences. For example, we do not know the impacts on public transport: driverless vehicles could provide a means to a lower cost service provision, but the availability of automated cars could lead to more car travel at the expense of collective transport.

This paper reports the methodology and the results of the socio-economic impact assessment of the SAFESPOT cooperative systems. Two application bundles, based on communication between vehicles or between vehicles and the infrastructure, which address the same problem areas of road safety (intersections, hazardous road and weather conditions, speed and inappropriate distance), are compared concerning their socio-economic benefits and system costs for the target year 2020. The results show that the infrastructure based bundle is slightly more effective in avoiding casualties, thus leading to higher safety benefits. The system costs are dominated by the infrastructure costs so that the lower invehicle costs of the infrastructure based system are outweighed by far. In terms of benefit-cost ratio the system based on vehicle-vehicle communication proves its efficiency whereas the vehicle-infrastructure based system is too expensive under the assumptions introduced for the assessment. In general it can be concluded that cooperative systems, especially when infrastructure comes into play, should aim towards leaner and smarter equipment at lower unit costs. Concerning deployment, it is argued that the system based on vehicle-vehicle communication looks more promising from the socio-economic perspective. The equipment of infrastructure on a limited scale, concentrating on black spots, would help to overcome the critical mass threshold of the vehicle-vehicle applications in early deployment phase.

In this paper, the authors present a benefit cost analysis model for assessing advanced vehicle control systems (AVCS). The model is applied to an analysis of the CHAUFFEUR system which involves two trucks that are coupled electronically.