Chevrolet helps customers put the breaks on rear crushes

Tailgating is great before football games, but in traffic, not so much. Rear-end crashes make up more than one in four of collisions reported to police each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – and many are preventable.

Forward Collision Alert technology available in several 2015 Chevrolet models, including the Silverado, Malibu, Equinox and Traverse, alerts customers in everyday car-following situations if they may be seconds away from a crash or following much too closely.

In the 2015 Chevrolet Impala, Tahoe and Suburban, available Front Automatic Braking goes beyond an alert to automatically slow or stop the vehicle under certain conditions, for example, if the driver does not respond quickly to an alert.

“Many of us have been in driving situations where the car ahead of us suddenly slows – or we momentarily look away at the wrong time – and we have to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision,” said General Motors Active Safety Technical Fellow Raymond J. Kiefer. “Front Automatic Braking provides a layer of driver assistance beyond Forward Collision Alert systems to help prevent this common crash situation.”

Depending on the model, Chevrolet’s Forward Collision Alert system uses a radar located in the front grille area or a camera mounted behind the windshield in front of the inside rearview mirror. When activated, it produces a green icon when a vehicle is detected ahead and an amber one when a driver is following much too closely.

A red “Collision Alert” warning will flash – along with rapid, high-pitched beeping – when the driver is approaching a vehicle ahead too quickly and may be seconds away from a potential crash. In Chevrolet models equipped with the available Safety Alert Seat that is turned on, instead of beeps, the patented seat will quickly pulse five times on both sides.