Euro NCAP: We ‘got it wrong’ when making current crash test regulations

Car safety organisation Euro NCAP admits it “got it wrong” when devising new tests for driver assistance technology.

An expert involved in devising the safety tests has admitted that the current rules allow car makers to fit safety technology that will score well in tests, despite not living up to the spirit of the rules.

Euro NCAP’s safety ratings have become an important marketing tool for car manufacturers, with buyers able to check how a potential purchase performs in a crash.

The modern tests also include ratings for driver assistance technology that can help to prevent, or mitigate the result of, a crash. This includes features such as autonomous emergency braking and lane-keeping assists.

It is the latter that has come under scrutiny. It is designed to help stop drivers wandering out of their lane and attempts to keep the car in a safe position on the road. Assists range from vibrations through the steering wheel to actively taking over the steering to pull the car back into line, depending on the manufacturer.

Speaking to car buying platform Carwow, a leading expert has admitted that Euro NCAP’s tests allowed manufacturers to score points even when ‘tramlining’, which means the car sticks within the white lines regardless of whether there is any danger in doing so.

This can create a “really annoying” experience for drivers, who might feel like they are fighting the car. This issue can arise in various scenarios, such as crossing the centre line to avoid a pothole or repositioning the vehicle on a narrow road to give a wide, oncoming vehicle more space.

Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP board member and chief strategic research officer for Thatcham Research, which crash tests cars in conjunction with Euro NCAP, told Carwow: “We didn’t think that manufacturers would engineer systems that just tramlined, and create all this annoyance; we thought that manufacturers would make the systems be interactive and use the radar system and use the camera system to look at the threat level, and therefore you would have a modulated response, a response that was threat derived.”

Avery added that manufacturers had asked whether ‘tramlining’ cars would still pass the tests, and were told that although the answer was yes, “would you really want to do that? Because that would make a really annoying system”.

He said that some manufacturers have now created technologies that score well in tests but offer a poor consumer experience, which is leading to a negative perception of the assistance. However, he remains convinced that lane support technology is a good thing when implemented well.

Avery noted that some manufacturers, such as Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, BMW and Ford, had put a lot of effort into making sure the systems were not annoying.

Hugo Griffiths, consumer editor at Carwow, said: “Lane-support technology is proven to improve road safety, so it’s disappointing to learn that many systems are not as effective as they could be.

“Some drivers find these features so intrusive that they switch them off, indicating that designing systems with crash-test criteria rather than drivers in mind can be counterproductive – not least because these systems have been shown to save lives.

“While much of the onus must be on car makers to do the right thing, it’s clear that Euro NCAP has some work to do as well. If the organisation is concerned that its own tests are awarding points to systems that provide a poor experience for drivers, it seems clear that a revision of its safety-test criteria is required.”