Vehicle safety technology is becoming a big business. The research firm Global Market Insights estimates that the global market for automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems in 2015 was over $1 billion – and it’s growing.

The firm predicts that the AEB market will exceed $15 billion by 2024, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent between 2016 and 2024.

AEB systems are designed to help prevent crashes or reduce their severity by applying the brakes for the driver. The systems use on-vehicle sensors such as radar, cameras or lasers to detect an imminent crash, warn the driver and apply the brakes if the driver does not take sufficient action quickly enough.

Increasing awareness of vehicle and driver safety, along with government mandates to install safety technology in vehicles, will propel the AEB market over the next decade or so, according to Global Market Insights.

“Although the adoption rate in vehicles was low in 2016, most of the automakers have started integrating basic AEB systems as a standard and optional feature into some of the models of their portfolio,” the research firm said.

In March 2016, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that 20 automakers – representing 99 percent of the U.S. auto market – committed to making automatic emergency braking a standard feature on virtually all new cars by September 2022.