Press Release – MESSRING founds Active Safety subsidiary

Munich, September 2018 – The question of how state-of-the-art driver assistance systems as well as partially autonomous, highly autonomous, and fully autonomous vehicles can demonstrate their suitability for use on public roads is a matter of concern for legislators as well as for the automotive industry and its suppliers worldwide. In order to keep pace with the needs of its clients and to cope with the new requirements, MESSRING, which for decades has been the global market leader for crash test facilities and their components, founded a subsidiary. The MESSRING Active Safety GmbH exclusively focuses on expanding the options available for testing active safety systems. “We need to work very hard to ensure that autonomous cars and active safety systems can increasingly demonstrate their reliability in realistic tests conducted off public roads”, says Dierk Arp, Managing Director of MESSRING. “We are developing the solutions of the future in collaboration with OEMs, research institutes, and specialized suppliers,” says Mr. Arp. The new company has access to all of the MESSRING Group’s resources, but also operates autonomously and benefits from the special expertise of its employees and the flat organizational structure within a small but highly specialized team.
Mr. Arp was able to attract Dr. Igor Doric, a proven expert in the field, as co-founder and Executive Manager of the new company. Dr. Doric served as the scientific and technical director of CARISSMA, the leading vehicle safety research center at the Technical University of Ingolstadt, for six years. As part of his activities in Ingolstadt, Dr. Doric has already worked on TargETS, an innovative system for testing assistance systems for pedestrian protection. Among other things, he designed a pedestrian dummy that can realistically simulate human movements like no other model. In his new position at MESSRING Active Safety, he will continue to work closely with the researchers at CARISSMA.
“Our development activities are currently focused on unprotected and vulnerable road users, especially pedestrians and cyclists,” says Dr. Doric. In his view, this is where new concepts and components are most needed in order to simulate frequently occurring critical traffic situations as realistically as possible.
MESSRING Active Safety wants to expand the possibilities for testing active safety systems step by step with realistic, practical, and solution-driven innovations. In this process, close collaboration with OEMs and their suppliers is extremely important to the company, in order to produce solutions that specifically meet the needs of testers and developers of autonomous vehicles. In this context, Mr. Arp always has one goal in mind: “In the field of active safety testing, we want to become what we already are in the field of passive safety – the leading system and full-service supplier.”