Patent ID: 7425043

Claim:
A method for triggering automatic emergency braking in a first vehicle to avoid or mitigate the effect of a rear end collision with a second vehicle traveling ahead of the first vehicle, by implementing a predefined emergency braking deceleration, said method comprising: determining an instantaneous driving situation of the first vehicle, based on a registered acceleration of the first vehicle; determining whether a predefined warning condition is fulfilled based on said instantaneous driving situation of said first vehicle, and on said predefined emergency braking deceleration; triggering a driver warning if said predefined warning condition is fulfilled; and triggering an automatic emergency braking process, which causes said first vehicle to decelerate with the predefined emergency braking deceleration, after the driver warning has been triggered; wherein, the warning condition includes, as target conditions, a predefined target safety distance and a predefined target relative speed between the first and second vehicles, which are to be attained after said automatic emergency braking process is completed; in determining the instantaneous driving situation of the first vehicle, in addition to the registered acceleration of the first vehicle, a registered current relative acceleration between the first and second vehicles is also taken into account; and triggering of said automatic emergency braking process is delayed until expiration of a predefined warning time period after the driver warning has been triggered.