Raymond J. Kiefer

Dr. Kiefer joined UMTRI in 2024 after a 35-year career at GM working primarily in safety organizations.  At GM he led, managed, and supported numerous cross-disciplinary research efforts aimed at using telematic, field operational test, naturalistic driving, test track, laboratory, and survey methods to ready crash avoidance and partial/full automation (i.e., Super Cruise, Cruise Origin) systems for production.  During his last 15 years at GM as a Technical Fellow providing “Zero Crashes” vision support, his efforts focused on large-scale field examinations of these systems via police-report, telematic, and insurance data, which were largely conducted with UMTRI.  Dr. Kiefer has also collaborated with other renowned automotive safety organizations, including NHTSA, IIHS, HLDI, and VTTI.  Dr. Kiefer pioneered with UMTRI the development and use of GM’s extremely affordable, large-scale, telematic-based (OnStar) data collection technique for examining system usage, safety benefits, and performance of various early GM production safety systems, which has been used in an ongoing series of NHTSA-funded studies.  He also led the invention of the industry-first Safety Alert Seat feature introduced in 2012, now widely deployed across GM vehicles, for which he has been granted 16 of his 21 U.S. patents.  As an alternative to traditional auditory crash alerts, this well-received seat vibration alert feature supports DEI by enabling drivers with high levels of hearing loss to perceive non-visual crash alerts, which are used as part of a multi-modality alerting approach that includes both visual and non-visual crash alerts.