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Forward Collision Warning — Jeep Test

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Article formerly published by CarDash. The ideas and opinions presented in this article are solely those of CarDash and do not reflect the ideas and opinions of AutoNation Mobile Service.

Many newer cars have sophisticated safety and convenience technology on board, including adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, and collision detection and mitigation. Although these features may be an intermediate phase as we move toward completely self-driving cars, they still have the potential for very significant standalone value.

CarDash to test some of these features, and began with the Forward Collision Warning system on a 2018 Jeep Cherokee. This is a similar system available on many Fiat Chrysler vehicles. Below is a video of our results, with further analysis below.


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We first searched the internet for information on the FCW but couldn’t easily find answers to some basic questions, such as:

These are all questions that are difficult for a FCA / Jeep owner to test on their Forward Collision Warning system because the system is only triggered when an accident appears inevitable else the owner would get far too many annoying false alarms. However, who wants to risk triggering an accident to test their safety system? FCA / Jeep owners are therefore always left wondering if their system is actually working.

It’s therefore nearly impossible to know if the system is working correctly. It would be like a new airplane not being able to test its ability to extend its wheels for a landing until it actually has to land. Not very safe, and not a good time to learn if your systems are working.

A recommendation for FCA / Jeep is to integrate a self-diagnostic feature. It would work like this:

These self diagnostic tools would give analytically and safety oriented owners some peace of mind that the safety features they invested in are working as expected, versus the current complete unknown.

The results of our test

As shown in the video above, the results of our test showed that the Forward Collision Warning system does not perform consistently, and also is quite difficult to trigger. We tested everything in the range of 5–15 MPH, and the manual says the system should work at any speed.

The results were as follows: