GLOBAL NCAP- A CRASH TOO FAR?
Once upon a time administrators inside the UK ‘Department for Transport’ (‘DfT’) and then-government funded ‘Transport and Road Research Laboratory’ (TRRL – now called ‘TRL’) knew of a major road hazard. The vehicle in question had been engineered by a company which had been state owned and state supported, but was routinely coming off second best in real world road accidents.
These safety experts reached out to other members across the European region in the early late 1990s, and so began the long progress to what became the ‘New Car Assessment Programme’ (NCAP) in the USA, and Euro NCAP. The initial work was to improve occupant safety and survival during impact.
The task was to get economically important companies to work with national and international governments, to improve road safety while leaving the legally required testing in place. Remember that vehicle which started the process? It met the legally required impact tests.
The process included the following points:
• The test protocols would be published on the website.
• The test results would be also published on the website, giving an overall rating from one to five stars.
• The impacts would include front end at a higher speed than the legal test – which significantly increased the vehicle performance requirement – and side impact using a sled with deformable front structure.
GM designed dummies – other types would be added later – would be used to assess impact performance, and from the start child seats were part of the programme, including the vehicle attachment points.
The dummies represent 95% males, five percent females and various child sizes to test seat belt/airbag interaction during impact. Deceleration and paint marks are used to assess severity of injury for each type of impact test, which is included in the vehicle test report.
Euro NCAP members had to fund one vehicle test suite (a minimum of two impacts per vehicle type) per year, and in time, manufacturers were able to fund tests as well, as long as the entire process was carried out by Euro NCAP staff using Euro NCAP approved test facilities.
The vehicle manufacturer safety community quickly supported the programme, with the unofficial ‘Royal Court’ of Volvo, Saab and Mercedes-Benz. The very first car to achieve five-star performance was Renault’s Laguna II in 2001, which led to private dismay from Volvo and Saab. Priceless. Of course, Volvo had taught Renault how to do this via their previous failed attempt to merge.
The outliers were given a choice: Become involved or ignore the process and risk a Euro NCAP member taking the opportunity to test their vehicles anyway, with no control whatsoever. The very idea of ‘praise or shame’ remains core to the NCAP model. The logic is if a manufacturer sells a vehicle they should address not only the legal minimum crash performance, but something better than legal minimum.
There’s more …
The statistical process of relating test requirements to real world patterns of accident saw the introduction of the side impact test with a pole, as well as variations of partial frontal impact. In turn the protocols were updated.
Crucially this means:
- Tests are performed with vehicles classed by weight/function.
- Test results relate to the protocols in use at the time.
- The maximum ‘reward’ for all results of all protocols so far is… five stars.
So, if we take a BMW X5 Euro NCAP test result from 2018 (five stars) and compare it to a BMW 5 series from 2023 (five stars) … well, we can’t. Even if certain types of vehicles are in the same weight (ie, inertia) class, there could be difficulties in comparing a bakkie with or without a chassis.
This is explained on the Euro NCAP web site – the protocols are published as well, under the ‘For Engineers’ tab.
The problems…
• Vehicle manufacturer press departments and retailers routinely make mistakes – such as claiming a 2024 car is ‘five star’ when that applied to a previous protocol.
• Where significant options were fitted to the vehicle in a test – ADAS, ESC, additional airbags – Euro NCAP flags this. However, retailers routinely apply the maximum ‘score’ across the range regardless of content.
• The whole system has baffled the public from the start, apart from ‘five stars’.
Euro NCAP members did lobby the administration that when significant new aspects were added – such as ESC or forward facing ADAS – these should have resulted in additional stars. This was and still is flatly rejected, citing difficulty in relating past performance to existing performance – even though Euro CAP specifically bar this. A riddle.
The benefit
The needless death of so many road users due to body structures not being stable in a 50 km/h frontal impact has almost disappeared in Europe and the US. Literally Euro NCAP has saved lives. To enable this body material section has been revolutionised, and in turn this requires expert repair following manufacturer procedures to restore the original performance after impact.
The way CCP embraced Euro NCAP and shown car after car arriving in Europe gets a five-star rating – again this points to the success of the system.
The migration of the NCAP system means the weighting of each aspect of the test has changed – in effect a 2015 car of a specific inertia class with ‘five-stars’ performance might rate ‘two-stars’ today, although the basic impact protection – especially for larger vehicles – has not altered. The reason is manufacturers have in the main understood how to engineer effective basic safety systems, and now the quest is to help drivers avoid accidents in the first place – hence recognising fitment of pre-accident warning systems.
The cost of physical crash testing is not insignificant – a suite of tests with one car per impact should consume about 10 million Rand, plus the cost of the vehicles and shipping to an approved lab. If the manufacturer can demonstrate the vehicles on sale in South Africa have an identical specification to those tested in Europe, then it may not be necessary to do the physical testing.
A final thought. The physical testing requires a lot of instrumentation and use of high-speed cameras. Yes, sometimes these don’t work. That is pretty upsetting, very expensive and rarely forgotten in the test labs.
By Andrew Marsh
