Euro NCAP on the future of road safety

Development of AES poses a significant technical challenge, says Avery, because it relies on multiple camera, radar and lidar sensors to detect a potential collision and steer the car to avoid an impact. “The steering wheel has to declutch so the driver can’t override the sensors and the car has to make a complex decision in a split second,” he says.

AES is expected to make production in around 2022-2023 in self-driving technology.

Crash testing has helped save 15,000 lives over past 20 years

ELKhas been tested since it was introduced, but the early systems weren’t very effective, according to Avery. A new, robotised, mobile rig will be deployed in 2018 to tighten the test at up to 70mph.

Another technology to be included in the star ratings is TAP, a radar sensor that applies the brakes to stop a shunt when a car pulls out from a side road. It works below 30mph at a range of 25m and is just becoming available on cars such as Volvo’s XC90. Ultimately, the same sensors will stop a car emerging from a side road into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

Euro NCAP isn’t leaving the 40mph barriertest procedure untouched, either, because it has two major revisions planned. The first will introduce ‘compatability’, the real-world impact of a smaller car with a bigger one. The second will bring in more sophisticated, £500,000-each ‘Thor’ crash test dummies, which are already in use by car manufacturers.

Basic physics dictates that the heavier car in a shunt exerts a larger force on the smaller car, exposing the occupants of a smaller car to more danger, yet today’s Euro NCAP test can represent only cars of the same size crashing into each other.

Although Euro NCAP emphasises that star ratings should be compared across the relevant vehicle class only – cars of similar weight – many drivers mistakenly believe that all five-star cars are equally as safe.

To address this, Euro NCAP will crash cars into a new 1500kg mobile deformable barrier (MDB), a soft obstacle riding on a wheeled trolley, which will transfer higher forces into a smaller car, compelling manufacturers to design safer small cars. It will also encourage better design of bigger cars with crumple zones perfected to treat smaller cars more gently.

When Euro NCAP was launched in 1997, it was contentious, with car makers unused to public scrutiny on the touchy subject of safety. But the industry has learned to work with Euro NCAP and Avery is quick to praise car makers for the massive advances they have made, graphically demonstrated by those Rover 100 and Honda Jazz tests.

At the same time, Euro NCAP itself has become more thorough since the early days. For example, the procedure for evaluating AEB, introduced in 2014, has multiple test modes. These include city and inter-urban speeds with three pass/ fail thresholds: avoid, mitigate and inactive. Points for the star rating are allocated on a scale of zero to 100%, with systems that ‘mitigate’ scored according to how much speed they scrub off. Further refinements will test AEB with different impact ‘offsets’. Avery describes this as a “very severe test for the sensing systems that will be difficult for the car makers to design”.

Euro NCAP is not standing still, but neither are car makers. The next 10 years promise more safety technology, better consumer testing and, most important, safer cars.

Ford Mustang scores two stars in Euro NCAP

HAS EURO NCAP IMPROVED ROAD SAFETY?

Euro NCAP measures its success by the significant drop in road users killed or injured over the past 20 years. When the programme started, there were 3200 road fatalities in the UK. Twenty years on, that has dropped to 1600, and occupant deaths and injuries are said to have fallen 63% to 8500 in the same period.

In that time, Euro NCAP has tested around 630 individual models in a total of 1800 crash tests and at a cost of £136 million.

The heavy investment and engineering development, of course, have come from the car industry, a point acknowledged by Matthew Avery from Euro NCAP’s UK partner, Thatcham Research. “This is a partnership and the car makers have risen to the challenge,” he says.

Avery ranks the three biggest safety contributions as stronger body engineering, load-limiting seatbelts and side curtain airbags.

He says: “When we started testing, the bodywork of many cars was just crumpling. Car makers have made huge advances in safety cells. Load limiter seatbelts help absorb the bigger loads on the occupants that follow on from the stiffer safety cells. And side airbags have been such lifesavers. That’s why we introduced the side-impact pole test.”