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The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) evaluates autonomous emergency braking (AEB) systems as part of its front crash prevention (FCP) ratings. To prepare the test vehicles' brakes, each vehicle must have 200 miles on the odometer and be subjected to the abbreviated brake burnish procedure of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 126. Other organizations conducting AEB testing follow the more extensive burnishing procedure described in FMVSS 135; Light Vehicle Brake Systems. This study compares the effects on AEB performance of the two burnishing procedures using seven 2014 model year vehicles. Six of the vehicles achieved maximum AEB speed reductions after 60 or fewer FMVSS 135 stops. After braking performance stabilized, the Mercedes ML350, BMW 328i, and Volvo S80 showed increased speed reductions compared with stops using brand new brake components.

Recent estimates of the annual cost to repair vehicle damage from motor vehicle crashes ranges from $17 billion (£9.1 billion) paid by U.K insurers to $45 billion paid by U.S. insurers. Many of these repairs were for damage sustained in low-speed front and rear impacts, with the majority costing less than $2, 500 to repair in both countries. In about a quarter of all claims the damage is limited to the vehicle corners and vehicle bumpers should prevent or limit much of the damage sustained in these minor crashes. However, many vehicles do not have bumper reinforcement beams that extend laterally much beyond the frame rails, leaving expensive vehicle components such as headlamps and fenders (wings) unprotected. Research by IIHS and Thatcham shows that 15 percent overlap front and rear crash tests at 5 km/h into a bumper-shaped barrier produce vehicle damage similar to that seen in real-world crashes and in vehicle-to-vehicle front-to-rear crash tests with low overlap.