Posted on October 17th, 2016

Happy Anniversary! MyCarDoesWhat Celebrates a Year of Progress

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It’s been a year since the MyCarDoesWhat campaign launched October 2015. Since then, the need to educate drivers about the safety technologies in their cars – what they do and how to use them – has never been greater or more important.

We accomplished a lot in a year. The campaign kicked off with a press conference with Deborah A.P. Hersman, president and CEO of the National Safety Council, and Daniel McGehee, director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator at the University of Iowa. They were joined on-stage by special guests U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and Mark Rosekind, Administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. With a successful launch to help drivers navigate new, lifesaving technologies, the campaign has received great coverage from media outlets ranging from The Huffington Post, Associated Press and The Boston Globe, to even an original blog post from Secretary Foxx.

But our work hasn’t stopped there. We’ve worked with industry groups, government leaders and safety leaders like the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), AAA, the National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA), the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) to keep MyCarDoesWhat in front of drivers.

MyCarDoesWhat partnered with the AAMVA to provide multimedia educational resources to local DMV offices throughout the country. The campaign also partnered with NADA to bring MyCarDoesWhat information to new car buyers. In the spring, Alex Epstein, Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Content at the National Safety Council, provided testimony to NHTSA on automated technologies and how to regulate them. His testimony and the MyCarDoesWhat campaign were featured in The Washington Post. Human factor engineers and research scientists at the Unvieristy of Iowa continue to conduct ground-breaking research to understand how the human interacts and behaves with the vehicle to better understand the driver mental model of advanced driver assistance technologies.

Since the launch, NHTSA and IIHS announced a commitment by 20 automakers to make automatic emergency braking a standard feature on all new cars no later than 2022. Additionally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it will update its 5-Star Rating System to include automatic emergency braking as a recommended safety technology.

Also, in September, NHTSA released voluntary guidelines for automated vehicles with the goal to create industry best practices that make consumers safer while promoting technological innovation.

Over the past year, MyCarDoesWhat has seen numerous successes, surpassed goals, and, most importantly, continues to strive to make a difference in vehicle and driver safety.