Last week, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized a major update to the US NCAP protocol, which will now look at more ADAS and at pedestrian protection
The US NCAP will now scrutinize vehicles for four more kinds of ADAS: pedestrian automatic emergency braking, lanekeeping assist, blind spot warning, and blind spot intervention. There are also more stringent performance criteria and a new test procedure for automatic emergency braking, which was already included in the protocol before the updates.
Too, there are new criteria to evaluate the ability of a vehicle’s front end to mitigate pedestrian injuries and fatalities in vehicle-to-pedestrian impacts, as well as mid- and long-term roadmaps to accommodate future updates amidst ongoing research and technological advancements in vehicle safety, including crash avoidance and crashworthiness improvements to protect bicyclists and motorcyclists, and an updated rating system.
The updated NCAP is considered a key component of the Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy, and of their work to significantly reduce serious injuries and deaths in traffic.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the NCAP update an “important step toward addressing the crisis on our roads and achieving the Department’s ambitious, long-term goal of zero road fatalities (…) Like our move earlier this year to make automatic emergency braking standard on new passenger cars and light trucks, these changes to [NCAP] will speed up adoption of technologies that reduce the frequency and severity of crashes, while helping consumers make informed decisions about buying a new car”.
NHTSA Chief Counsel (top lawyer) Adam Raviv says NHTSA’s goal with NCAP “has always been to help consumers choose safer vehicles and to encourage manufacturers to improve vehicle safety. With these NCAP updates, we’re ensuring consumers have more useful and relevant information on the latest safety technologies and that the program keeps up with the pace of technological change and innovation”.
The official Final Decision Notice, setting forth the program changes in complete detail, is available online.
DVN Analysis by Chief Editor Daniel Stern
This update to the US NCAP is interesting in a variety of ways. It’s enormously encouraging and gratifying to see official recognition of the safety benefits that flow from ADAS technologies, and to see NHTSA’s openness to adding more kinds of driver-assists to the NCAP protocol as the technologies evolve and safety-benefit evidence accumulates.
And it’s well worth celebrating the addition of pedestrian-protection provisions. The UN Regulations used outside the American regulatory island first began exerting pedestrian-protection requirements over half a century ago in 1972, when injurious projections (rigidly-mounted sideview mirrors, hostile hood ornaments, etc) were banned on new vehicles by ECE R26. Over the decades and years since then, the UN Regulations have been progressively strengthened on this matter; in 2013 UN R127 codified modern pedestrian-protection requirements.
But the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards have never contained any pedestrian-protection requirements. One might ask why NHTSA wouldn’t issue a new FMVSS to compel automakers to address that issue, rather than opting to use NCAP, to encourage automakers without actually forcing them. On first thought, it might seem as though the NCAP route wouldn’t advance the safety interest as forcefully as the regulatory route. But in practical fact, the opposite is likely true. The regulatory process in the US is a slow and difficult one for NHTSA for reasons ranging from historical to legal, as I explained in detail in my keynote at a DVN Workshop a few years ago.
That means even if NHTSA’s dedicated safety experts, devoted to the worthy goal of reducing and eventually eliminating traffic violence, all wanted to put in new requirements, it would take many years and a vast expenditure of agency resources—and that’s if industry (the regulated parties) were more or less onside with the idea. If not, it would be even harder and more resource-intensive. There are only 24 hours in a day, even at NHTSA! Non-regulatory mechanisms like NCAP have proven highly effective in moving vehicle design, configuration, equipment, and safety performance in good directions.
Often, this favourable movement is greater and faster than could practically be achieved by putting in a new mandatory safety standard. The reason why is fairly obvious: a periodically- and progressively-updated NCAP protocol incentivizes automakers to get the best possible score, because their customers actively seek out high NCAP scores. Market competition drives innovation in safety performance and cost-effectiveness on an ongoing basis, probably to a degree greater than a mandatory regulation. So NHTSA’s choice of mechanism here is valid and laudable.
It’s worth taking a look at the history of this particular action. The process got started early in 2016, and we first reported on it in January of that year. In its initially proposed form, the NCAP upgrade would have included provisions more or less in line with last week’s announcement, but also several lighting-related criteria: NCAP points for low beams giving better seeing and lower glare, and for amber rather than red rear turn signals.
At the start of February 2016, we analyzed, in depth, the parts of the proposal related to low-beam performance. And at the end of February, we did a deep dive into the responses to NHTSA’s request for comment on the proposal. Many comments—from industry, advocacy groups, and private individuals alike—were enthusiastically in favour of the lighting proposals, though automaker opinions were divided on technical aspects of the low beam performance ideas and on the turn signal colour matter; Ford, for example, said amber turn signals required “more research and development to demonstrate appropriate reliability” before they should be eligible for NCAP points.
In March 2022, we reported on NHTSA’s proposal for an NCAP upgrade, the details of which were fairly similar to last week’s finalized protocol updates (and we noted at that time that the lighting-related parts of the 2016 proposal had been withdrawn).
Looking back at this timeline, one can’t help noticing it is measured in a number of years. And that emphasizes the point: however long it might have taken to get NCAP upgraded in ways that will surely accelerate the prevalence in traffic of cars with effective safety equipment and design they didn’t have before, it almost surely would have taken longer if NHTSA had pursued new regulations instead—and the outcome might well have been less certain.
So while it might be unfortunate from the American driver’s-eye view that equipment long considered basic elsewhere in the world (low-glare low beams, turn signals that don’t look the same as brake lights), it is worth noting that headlight glare is a hot topic around the world right now, so perhaps now these meritorious ADAS and pedestrian-protection upgrades have been made, some attention might be turned toward lighting. If, as, and when it happens, you’ll read about it in Driving Vision News!
