With ContiGuard®, Continental has opened up a new dimension of driving safety technology, as it integrates active and passive safety systems, enhanced by surrounding sensors and their coordinated interaction. With ContiGuard®, our customers can efficiently achieve a significant reduction of accidents and number of fatalities on the road to Vision Zero (the vision of the accident avoiding car), or at least minimize the consequences and the risk of injury for all road users.

ContiGuard® is an anticipating, intelligent, damage-avoiding, comprehensive, scalable system and therefore part of our efforts to bring driving safety to all vehicle classes and markets.

In order for driving to remain free from accidents:

• Normal driving
• Hazard

If it does come to an accident:

• Pre-crash
• In-crash
• Post-crash

During every driving phase, various technologies interact in a variety of ways to offer the driver, passengers, and all traffic participants an even safer driving experience.

For ContiGuard®, we have identified five different driving phases:

    Normal Driving 
    Hazard 
    Pre-Crash 
    In-Crash 
    Post-Crash

The vision (Vision Zero) of the accident avoiding car is within reach: ContiGuard® is our contribution towards integrated safety for all traffic participants in the different phases of driving.

During normal driving, it provides driver support functions like adaptive cruise control, heading control or speed limit monitoring.

During possible hazardous situations warning functions like distance warning, lane departure warning or speed violation warn the driver. If necessary, stabilizing functions like ESC actively stabilize the vehicle. Brake assist functions from pre-braking to Autonomous Emergency Braking become active when the situation gets critical.

During a pre-crash situation, additional protective functions like seat belt tension, vehicle crash preparation are initiated.

During the crash, situation-dependent airbag deployment, based on pre-crash information, offers a maximum of protection. If these measures are not sufficient to avoid an accident, every possible measure will be activated that can mitigate the impact and its consequences. To ensure the best possible protection of the occupants, situation-dependent airbag deployment, based on pre-crash information is initiated to offer a maximum of protection. An important role is played here by technologies like the crash impact sound sensing and roll-over sensors, because they respond with swift precision.

In the post-crash situation, eCall and car-to-car accident warning provide fast assistance.

The Decade of Driving Safety

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the period from 2011 to 2020 the Decade of Action for Road Safety, and based on a proposal put forward by the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), the European Commission has published guidelines for road traffic safety for the same period. The goals if the new guidelines include reducing the number of traffic fatalities by a further 50 percent.

Every year, the equivalent of the entire population of a small city is killed in traffic accidents in the EU alone. As a result, there is a clear need for further improvements in traffic safety throughout Europe.

One thing is clear: Driver assistance systems and integrated safety systems like ContiGuard® are considered key technologies when it comes to enhancing driving safety. Without them, it would be difficult to achieve the goal of cutting traffic fatality figures in half by 2020.

Find out more on ContiGuard®:

   The different driving phases 
   Integration options of ContiGuard® 
   The future with ContiGuard®

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