WP 5000: Stakeholder Analyses and Overall Evaluation Results

The traditional cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as carried out in a preceding work package (WP 2000) estimates the potential benefits and the potential costs of Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems across a set of impacts and converted into monetary terms by multiplying impact units by prices per unit. Therefore, CBA delivers first information of the desirability of IVSS on the basis of the economic principle of allocative efficiency (resource savings approach). However, the significance of CBA-results is limited due to following aspects:

Material, institutional or political restrictions are not integrated within the CBA. Political decision-makers, which orientate themselves at cost-benefit results, should be explicitly informed about existing risks and restrictions via qualitative comments added to the calculations.
The market success of intelligent vehicle safety systems depends mainly on the benefits and costs with respect to their distribution between the different stakeholders, which have an interest in the market introduction of IVSS or which are affected by these measures.
Besides cost savings due to improved traffic processes, IVSS will have significant macro-economic impacts. These impacts are important for the evaluation and political acceptance of IVSS and can serve as an argument in favour of an introduction of IVSS.

Based on the results of the SEiSS project a unique approach is chosen for the socio-economic impact assessment of intelligent vehicle safety systems. The core element is that CBA is enlarged by economic impact assessment for the different stakeholder groups (users, OEM, insurance companies, public). The structure of task in this work package does also follow this classification. Following evaluation methods are used for assessing the effects of intelligent vehicle safety systems on stakeholders:

Financial Analysis (FA): assesses the impacts of an activity on the own financial costs and revenues of the acting institution. The FA is carried out for insurance companies and public authorities.
Break-even analysis (BEA) can be defined as a method to find out the recovery point in time, when expenditures for an investment are reimbursed by the benefits of the investment. Objective of the BEA is the determination of the break-even point (= profit threshold) for the stakeholder. BEA is used for system users and OEM investigations.

The macroeconomic impacts of IVSS have to be analyzed in additional calculations and should constitute the basis of the system appraisal together with the CBA. Macroeconomic impacts which are in the scope of the eIMPACT project are the increases of production value, income and employment. Within the macroeconomic impact assessment the social effects of IVSS-introduction play also an important role for the market success. Such effects on the income distribution are until now largely unexplored for new technologies in the transport sector.

The final outcome in the work package will be a comprehensive deliverable considering the overall effects of selected Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems. In this deliverable implementation drawbacks will be identified on the basis of the stakeholder assessment and a path towards a successful market deployment will be pointed out.