An automotive vehicle forward collision avoidance system, comprising means for establishing the presence of a pedestrian in front of a vehicle hosting said system; means for estimating the position, velocity and acceleration of the pedestrian; means for establishing a risk zone in front of the host vehicle arranged to establish the risk zone as an area representing the predicted coverage of the host vehicle based on the host vehicle width (w) and an extra width (d) on each side of the host vehicle along a predicted path of the host vehicle; means for predicting the future path of the pedestrian and the host vehicle in order to predict the lateral position (y) of the pedestrian at a moment when the host vehicle reaches the pedestrian in a longitudinal direction (x); means for executing a collision avoidance task arranged such that: - if the pedestrian, based on the pedestrian's current position, velocity and acceleration, is predicted as being able to stop before entering the risk zone through applying a certain predetermined maximum acceleration for pedestrians in a direction opposite to the pedestrian's velocity, the pedestrian is predicted to stop at a position just before entering the risk zone and no collision avoidance task is executed; and; - if the pedestrian, based on the pedestrian's current position, velocity and acceleration, is predicted as not being able to stop before entering the risk zone, then the future position of the pedestrian is predicted using the assumption that the pedestrian will continue to move according to an observation based motion model and a collision avoidance task is executed, characterized in that the host vehicle is equipped with a lane marker sensor for detection of lane markers and that either the area between the detected left hand side and right hand side lane markers is used to define the risk zone or, in the case that only lane markers at one side of the host vehicle are detected, these detected lane markers at one side of the host vehicle are used for defining that side of the risk zone whilst the host vehicle width (w) and said extra width (d) are used for defining the other side of the risk zone. - if the pedestrian, based on the pedestrian's current position, velocity and acceleration, is predicted as being able to stop before entering the risk zone through applying a certain predetermined maximum acceleration for pedestrians in a direction opposite to the pedestrian's velocity, the pedestrian is predicted to stop at a position just before entering the risk zone and no collision avoidance task is executed; and; - if the pedestrian, based on the pedestrian's current position, velocity and acceleration, is predicted as not being able to stop before entering the risk zone, then the future position of the pedestrian is predicted using the assumption that the pedestrian will continue to move according to an observation based motion model and a collision avoidance task is executed, characterized in that the host vehicle is equipped with a lane marker sensor for detection of lane markers and that either the area between the detected left hand side and right hand side lane markers is used to define the risk zone or, in the case that only lane markers at one side of the host vehicle are detected, these detected lane markers at one side of the host vehicle are used for defining that side of the risk zone whilst the host vehicle width (w) and said extra width (d) are used for defining the other side of the risk zone.