For certain safety classes, to reach the highest qualification, the vehicle-under-test must pass some pedestrian accident scenarios, so it's not that the manufacturers do this out of good will. The S-Class used to flatten pedestrians quite liberally, which caused it to fail certain tests, which in turn caused them to implement this: http://www.daimler.com/dccom/0-5-1210222-1-1210363-1-0-0-121...