Insurance group calls for Amazon, FedEx and others to use more safety tech in delivery vans

By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN

(CNN) — Researchers are pointing to a dangerous element of the booming e-commerce home delivery business in America: vans.

About half a million light vans are sold in the United States every year, with many of those going to companies like Amazon and FedEx. Used to deliver packages to people’s front doors all over America, they are also involved in their share of crashes, many of which could be avoided with readily available technologies.

Vans like these are involved in an average of about 935,000 police-reported crashes each year, including 98,000 resulting in injuries and 3,600 resulting in deaths, according to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a group funded by auto insurers.

But there are ways to make these vans safer using technologies that are already widely available on everyday cars and SUVs.

Light vans are those with a gross vehicle weight rating of less than 10,000 pounds. That means the van itself plus its occupants – including the driver – and all its cargo cannot weigh more than 10,000 pounds. Models include the Ford Transit, Ram ProMaster and Mercedes Sprinter. Since they are small and easily maneuverable with lots of cargo space they are commonly used for package delivery.

The research suggests a lot of those crashes could be prevented if these vans were equipped with various types of crash prevention technology, some of which is commonly available on passenger cars.

Front crash prevention technologies, like automatic emergency braking, could have helped prevent or, at least, mitigated, about a fifth of fatal crashes involving light vans, according to the IIHS. Lane departure prevention technology could have helped prevent or, at least, reduce the seriousness of, about 11% of those fatal crashes.

Automatic emergency braking, which applies a vehicle’s brakes automatically if a vehicle in front stops and the driver fails to respond, could stop 77,000 light van crashes each year, the Institute said. Most new passenger vehicles today are already sold with automatic emergency braking thanks to industry-wide agreements but the technology is relatively rare on light vans, according to IIHS.

Forward collision warning with brake assist and pedestrian detection is standard on all Ram ProMaster vans, said a spokesman for Stellantis, the company that owns Ram. Many of the features recommended by IIHS, including forward collision warning, automatic braking, blind spot warning, and speed limiting controls, are available on Ford and Mercedes vans, as well, spokespeople for those automakers said.

The automakers did not say what percentage of vans sold to customers had optional safety features, though.

“Amazon branded delivery vans are equipped with third-party technology that measures and monitors unsafe driving behaviors such as speeding, distraction, and failure to wear a seat belt or obey a road sign,” Amazon said in a statement shared with CNN. “Since we’ve incorporated this technology into our branded vehicles, [delivery] drivers’ collision rates have declined nearly 40%, and from 2022 to 2023, it reduced unsafe driving behaviors by 62% in the U.S.”

And there’s technology that can crack down on things like speeding, too, which is especially dangerous in a heavily-loaded van. That tech could help prevent 37% of fatal crashes involving delivery vans, the Institute said.

Pedestrians, in particular, would benefit. Automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, which uses cameras and sensors to detect a person in front of the vehicle and brakes automatically, could prevent 1,200 light van crashes with pedestrians each year, the Institute said.

Van drivers as well as others would benefit from other sorts of technology, according to IIHS. In more than 60% of crashes and more than half of fatal crashes, the occupant of another vehicle or a pedestrian or cyclist was killed or injured. In the remainder, it was the van driver that suffered.

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