Federal Regulators May Update Crash Testing, Possibly Making High Tech Safety Gear Mandatory

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would update its crash-testing program, the New Car Assessment Program, by 2020.

That could result in more high-tech safety features becoming standard equipment, along with more measures to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists. NHTSA announced the review on Oct. 16.

Consumer advocacy groups said features like automatic emergency braking, lane-departure warning and blind-spot detection should become part of NCAP testing. Automatic emergency braking stops a vehicle if sensors detect a front-end collision is imminent, and if the driver doesn’t respond to alerts quickly enough.

The New Car Assessment Program rates vehicles on a five-star scale. By itself, NCAP isn’t the same as a legal requirement, but if a feature becomes necessary to achieve the highest rating, in effect it becomes mandatory because automakers want to avoid a poor rating.

“This is most welcome news,” said Joan Claybrook, a board member for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, at a press conference hosted by the group on Oct. 17. “The devil, of course, is in the details.”

Claybrook is a former NHTSA administrator. She helped launch the original NCAP program 40 years ago. “It’s time to act,” she said, “to get NCAP into the 21^st century.” She complained that because it hasn’t been updated, the current U.S. NCAP program is “a shell of its former self … easily manipulated by automakers to achieve the highest, five-star rating.”

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, said roughly 90 percent of vehicles rated for the U.S. market were awarded either four or five stars. That was for model year 2014. “The fact that most of the current fleet achieves 4- or 5-stars does not mean something is wrong with today’s NCAP, but rather, shows vehicle manufacturers’ commitment to safety advancements over time,” the alliance said in 2016, in reaction to an earlier proposal to update NCAP.

At the press conference on Oct. 17, consumer advocates were skeptical whether NHTSA really will get around to updating NCAP, because earlier promises to update NCAP never came to pass. That was true under both Obama and Trump Administrations, Claybrook said.

In the meantime, she said crash-testing programs in other jurisdictions, especially the European Union’s version, EuroNCAP, have gotten ahead of the U.S. program by adding tests for more modern safety systems.

“NCAP needs to keep up with the rest of the world,” said Jack Gillis, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, and another NCAP pioneer. “Essentially, we are testing vehicles the same way we did 40 years ago.”