Newly-registered cars across Europe, North America and Japan have been fitted with some 6.9 million driver assistance systems in 2007. The number is expected to reach 18.2 million by 2014.

Driver assistance systems will be a key contributor to the European Union’s eSafety action programme for road safety that aims to halve the number of road fatalities by 2010, according to just-auto, which carried out the estimates.

Driver assistance systems are facing significant problems in software control, which include the system’s role in making various systems work together and determining when the system will intervene with the driving process.

The systems, which falls in three distinct categories, including collision-warning, collision-mitigation systems and avoidance systems, could detect potential accident situations, provide warnings or automatically engage a vehicle’s brakes to maintain a pre-set distance between vehicles.