Model S

Make
Tesla
Segment
Sedan

In the USA, the IIHS and NHTSA take care of local crash-testing standards, but over in Europe, it's the Euro NCAP that upholds the safety standards that manufacturers need to adhere to. Like the American agencies, NCAP is looking to improve its standards so that all passenger vehicles in the region are forced to be safer. To launch this initiative, the organization put 15 forward-looking cars to the test, including the Tesla Model S.

Speaking to Autocar, Euro NCAP's secretary general Michiel van Ratingen explains how the organization will carry this out over the next few years. None of this is completely relevant to the American market right now, but it is still enlightening to see how the topic of safety is evolving around the world.

The road to 2030 includes focusing more on assisted and automated driver support systems. NCAP will test driver monitoring systems to find out how effectively cars can keep their drivers alert. It will also test speed assistance and passive safety tests that also consider different genders and ages. Other key testing criteria include active safety testing properly simulating real road environments to see how effectively human-machine interfaces can keep their inhabitants safe. Electric vehicles will also have their batteries tested for combustion in the event of a collision.

These are stringent tests that both the IIHS and NHTSA could look at adopting as well, seeing that autonomy and electric vehicles are becoming more prominent in the USA. The IIHS's recent updated tests reveal that cars in smaller categories do need to step it up, particularly when looking at the side crash tests.

Euro NCAP's Vision 2030 plan is essentially a manifesto that is set to hold all manufacturers to a high safety standard. This will be more reliant on technologies rather than structural design. The organization will look at how safe a car is to drive, what its crash avoidance capabilities are, what crash protection measures are installed, and how it performs once it encounters a collision.

Euro NCAP hopes to start rolling this out by 2026, with updates set to be implemented every three years, which is coincidentally almost the same amount of time needed for a manufacturer to facelift a model range. Its main goal is to place focus on collision prevention rather than crash testing because this is ultimately the safer incident for a car's driver and passengers.

Although the IIHS and NHTSA do not have similar road maps published, they have both been strengthening the standards relating to required safety features such as autonomous braking for all trucks. Over in Australia, ANCAP has also pushed for underwater crash testing due to the rising level of flooding across the world.

Compared to the Euro NCAP, the IIHS is being a bit more realistic about the future of automotive safety and warns that autonomous technology may not be as safe as some may believe. Its recent study revealed that a self-driving car would identify hazards better than a human would, but its intervention would unlikely be that much better. Time will tell whether the Euro NCAP is making the right move with this drastic shift in crash testing, but by forcing automakers to improve these safety systems, the technology can only get better quicker.