This paper presents a new automotive safety function called Emergency Lane Assist (ELA). ELA combines conventional lane guidance systems with a threat assessment module that tries to activate the lane guidance interventions according to the actual risk level of lane departure. The goal is to only prevent dangerous lane departure maneuvers. The ELA safety function is based on a statistical method that evaluates a list of safety concepts and tries to maximize the impact on accident statistics while minimizing development and hardware component costs. ELA. runs in a demonstrator and successfully intervenes during lane changes that are likely to result in a collision and is also able to take control of the vehicle and return it to a safe position in the original lane. It has also been tested on 2000 km of roads in traffic without giving any false interventions.