Loss of Control Car Accidents on Indian Roads - Benefit Estimation of ESC 2019-26-0009

India has one of the highest growth rates of individual mobility in the world, as well as one of the largest numbers of road casualties. Modern active safety systems are slowly becoming established in the Indian passenger car market. The intension of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the car safety feature Electronic Stability Control (ESC) for India. The Indian accidents has to be analysed to identify the reliable root cause. For this purpose, passenger car Loss of Control accidents were investigated in more detail with the aim of estimating the safety potential of ESC for India. A methodology is developed to extrapolate the in-depth accident database of Road Accident Sampling System for India (RASSI) to the entire accident situation in India. Loss of Control accidents are analysed with regard to their root causes, crash consequences and contributing factors. The initial findings of the study reveals that the accident scenario Loss of Control of cars is significantly prominent in India. The analysis shows that about 40,000 Loss of Control car accidents with injury occur in India every year and in addition, about 4,000 accidents due to sudden tire damage. Another important impact of the use of RASSI is that the phenomenon of underreporting becomes visible. This issue is also included in this study for the first time. It is found that up to 33,000 car accidents with casualties could be positively influenced if ESC would be equipped in all passenger cars. This corresponds to 12% of all car accidents with casualties in India and ESC could prevent up to 9,000 road deaths and around 14,000 serious injured road users annually. However, the study furthermore shows that infrastructure measures and safety awareness can also contribute to reduce the number of car accidents and or casualties.