The impact of energy efficient driving strategies on rear-end safety

In recent years, driver assistant systems have been introduced that enable the driver to reduce the fuel consumption. Several studies have shown that energy efficient driving has often positive effects on the driving safety. Though, the safety has been mostly evaluated regarding the preceding traffic and does not consider trade-offs due to the disacceptance of following drivers. Therefore, within this paper, the influences of energy efficient driving on rear-end safety are investigated in a study with real traffic. The results show that using energy efficient deceleration strategies before a speed limit, e.g. fuel cut-off or coasting, leads to a significant reduction of the time headway between the following and ego-vehicle. For example, the median time proportion of time headways lower than 0.9 s is increased from 0 to 25 % when the coasting strategy is applied.