Two-Thirds of Safety Experts Say Car Tech Ads Are Lying. The Math Says They’re Being Generous.

A survey of 1,000 transport specialists across ten countries, published this week by Economist Enterprise and financed by brake manufacturer Brembo, found that two-thirds of professionals believe automaker advertising overstates advanced driver-assistance capabilities.^[1] Thirty percent named human misuse of these systems as the single leading driver of mobility safety issues. Their own experts are telling you the brochure is fiction. They are, if anything, underselling the problem.

A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Safety Research, published earlier this year by Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre, modeled the real-world impact of every mandatory ADAS feature in the EU fleet through 2030. Combined result of automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assist, intelligent speed assist, and reverse cameras: a 6 percent reduction in injury crashes.^[2] AEB alone accounts for five of those six percentage points. Lane-keeping? Zero-point-two percent. Reverse cameras? Another zero-point-two. One feature does 83 percent of the actual safety work, and no dealership has ever put it on a poster.

Meanwhile, FARS data tells us where people actually die. Of the 187,058 fatalities in the dataset, 92.4 percent involve vehicles from model years before 2018, built before most ADAS features existed as standard equipment.^[3] Post-2018 model years account for 7.6 percent of the body count. Post-2020? Just 3.2 percent. So the industry’s number-one safety anxiety targets a sliver of the fleet that kills at a fraction of the rate of everything else on the road.

That disconnect plays out in dealership pricing. Tesla charges $15,000 for Full Self-Driving, which NHTSA just recalled for the second time because it runs stop signs and enters intersections in turn-only lanes.^[4] Ford sells BlueCruise subscriptions. GM markets Super Cruise. These are the features that get the commercials, the press events, the over-the-air mythology. Automatic emergency braking, which became standard across the industry through a voluntary commitment in 2023, gets nothing. It is free, it is invisible, and it does five-sixths of the ADAS safety lifting.

What this means for you: When you’re shopping for a car, the feature that will most likely prevent you from dying in a crash is already included at no extra charge. Before paying thousands for a system the industry’s own experts say is oversold, check the one thing that matters: does the car have a good IIHS front crash prevention rating? That test measures AEB performance. Everything else is marketing with a body-count asterisk.