Current developments in the automotive industry such as autonomous driving, electric mobility and digitisation are posing fresh challenges in terms of vehicle safety. Development in the phases of passive and active safety (from the 1960s onwards) from integral safety to data-supported global safety is the research area that SAFIR has taken up.
Vehicle safety has been a research topic at THI since 2004, and it is one of THI's three proven HRK research focus areas (see HRK Research Map). The focus was initially on the development and testing of individual systems. Integral safety systems have been investigated since 2008. In 2008 THI was awarded the Bavarian Innovation Prize for the development of Crash Impact Sound Sensing (CISS), which has since gone into series production. In 2010, this strong record in the field of vehicle safety was a crucial factor in the recommendation by the German Council of Science and Humanities to establish the first university of applied sciences research facility at THI. The CARISSMA research and development centre opened in June 2016, now to be expanded to become the nationwide scientific control centre for vehicle safety in Germany. The SAFIR research projects aim to support this objective: based on the research outcomes of CARISSMA projects in the field of integral safety, SAFIR is the next step towards global and networked safety – Vehicle Safety 4.0.
Vehicle safety as a research focus
