Ladies and Gentlemen! Esteemed Conference Participants!
We are delighted to welcome you to the 32nd EVU Conference, taking place from September 12 to September 14, 2024, in Kufstein, Austria.
Over the past decades, EVU has not only fulfilled its historically set goals of enabling, promoting, and conducting research and scientific work in the field of accident analysis and vehicle safety, including vehicle repair and technical assessment, but has also greatly multiplied these achievements through its conferences. The expert knowledge of EVU specialists in evaluating technical traffic safety issues and many legal security questions is highly valued internationally, far beyond national borders.
As a result, EVU has evolved into a significant international traffic safety institution, specializing in the investigation and analysis of traffic accidents.
Austrian experts have been involved from the very beginning in the founding of EVU in Germany. The first EVU conference was held on November 5, 1992, in Vienna, in collaboration with the FSV (Research Society for Transport and Roads) and the Institute of Transportation (BOKU Vienna) as an interdisciplinary conference focused on the main topic "Information Processing by Road User." It wasn't until ten years later, in 2002, that EVU Austria became an independent association.
From the outset, EVU aimed to analyze traffic safety issues as interdisciplinarily as possible through its conferences. Looking back over these years, it is clear that this approach to accident investigation was entirely correct. Many outstanding analysis programs and methods have resulted in groundbreaking research achievements in analysis and simulation, which are unique and highly regarded internationally.
Despite all the successes, it remains crucial for experts in the field of traffic safety to maintain a holistic perspective in the future, especially as the gap between those who are knowledgeable and those who are not continues to widen. While even the most complex accident scenarios are analyzed in court using scientific methods, these methods have often not yet been fully integrated into accident prevention and avoidance practices at the administrative level across Europe. Instead, roads are evaluated using dubious rating methods, rather than clearly analyzing the causes of accidents and implementing corrective measures.
Similar issues arise concerning the main topic of the 32nd EVU Conference, namely driving assistance systems. The automotive industry's desire to significantly advance sensor development in a short time will fail if the crucial dialogue with accident experts and other interdisciplinary professionals is not fully realized.
Furthermore, analogous conclusions can be drawn for the field of driver education. Current training standards must, of course, incorporate the knowledge transfer from our high-tech accident analysis programs and include analysis programs about visual gazes and human behavior and physiological performance limits.
Therefore, it would be wise for us, as experts, to not only make our knowledge available exclusively for legal purposes but to increasingly use this knowledge to actively enhance traffic safety and accident prevention on-site—through local accident analysis, road safety audits, and road safety inspections. Moreover, collaboration with the automotive industry, particularly in the areas of autonomous driving and driver assistance, should be expanded even further, and all experiences from accident analysis should be more intensively shared with government agencies responsible for driver education and driving schools.
In this sense, the professional exchange of our expert opinions through new forms of communication must be further developed and promoted to prepare for the future. We therefore need an electronic EVU expert forum for "high-quality discussions," where targeted technical discussions can be conducted.
Viewed in this light, this knowledge transfer will lead to a higher degree of interdisciplinarity, which will ultimately and in the long term open up new business fields for experts and enable new professional developments. This path is clearly outlined by the goals of EVU and the commitment of our subject matter experts on an international level.
Ernst Pfleger (Head)
Hannes Sappl
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2024
European Association for Accident Research and Analysis (EVU)
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Only members can see the details and the attached documents.