The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a government agency that conducts automotive safety testing in its New Car Assessment Program. NCAP testing rates vehicles on a one-to-five-star scale for front and side crash protection as well as rollover resistance. The results can be found on NHTSA’s Web site (www.safercar.gov) and on vehicle window stickers. While the agency has done a good job of making its crash test results known to the public, NHTSA sees several ways that it could improve existing NCAP tests and add more ratings.

The majority of today’s vehicles receive four or five stars in the front and side crash tests. With so many vehicles scoring so closely, the current ratings don’t show much differentiation from one vehicle to the next. So, NHTSA believes that reworking the criteria for each test could provide better information about the differences between vehicles. The agency also believes its frontal crash testing can be improved by evaluating and possibly adding a lower speed test (25 mph or below) and taking into account injury evaluations to the knees, thighs and hips.

There are several ways NHTSA thinks it could improve side crash testing. The current test uses a deformable barrier that was designed to represent the height and weight of an early 1980s passenger car. Changing the barrier to the same barrier used by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which represents a truck or SUV, is a possibility. Changing the barrier’s impact angle and impact location is also under consideration.

Another side impact test could be incorporated using a narrow object to represent a pole in addition to the full-width barrier. Head-injury readings would be taken in this test, and two types of dummies could be used. Any vehicle would need head-protecting side airbags to perform well in this test, thus encouraging expanded installation of this valuable safety technology.

Other proposals to improve the side impact test include using new dummies that can be used to measure additional lateral injuries, increasing the speed of the impact in the test and developing test procedures that better evaluate injury risk in vehicles fully equipped with both torso-protecting front side and head-protecting curtain side airbags.

While electronic stability control is not considered in the NCAP rollover test, NHTSA says this valuable technology has the potential to reduce passenger car rollover crashes by 64 percent and SUV rollovers by 85 percent. According to NHTSA, most of the benefits of stability control in rollover reduction are not due to the technology actually decreasing rollover risk. Instead, benefits are due to stability control’s ability to reduce loss of control that can lead to vehicles leaving the road, which greatly increases the chance of a rollover. NHTSA believes that a new rollover risk model may result by comparing crash statistics for vehicles equipped with stability control versus those without.

Unlike the IIHS, NHTSA does not perform rear crash tests. The agency is considering linking to IIHS rear crash test results, providing real-world rear crash safety data by vehicle class and eventually conducting its own dynamic rear crash test.

Crash avoidance is another area NHTSA wants to promote. Specifically, NHTSA pinpoints three crash avoidance technologies that it sees as priorities: electronic stability control (discussed above), lane departure avoidance/warning and rear-end collision avoidance. Lane departure warning systems track vehicle position in a lane and warn the driver or even help the driver steer back into the lane if it detects the vehicle has crossed lane lines without the use of a turn signal. A rear-end collision avoidance system detects vehicles ahead, usually through radar, and warns the driver when a crash seems imminent. In some cases, a rear-end collision avoidance system also applies the brakes to prevent a rear-end collision.

To entice customers to choose these technologies, NHTSA is considering adding a crash avoidance rating, probably given as a letter grade of A, B or C. Two possibilities are on the table. In the first, each technology would be weighted equally and a vehicle offering all three technologies would get an A, two a B and one a C. The other option is to evaluate each technology’s effectiveness and weight the letter grades. In this case, stability control, which is the most effective of the three, might automatically earn a B grade by itself. In the future, crash avoidance tests may be added and a star rating system could be developed.

Other technologies exist that reduce harm before, during and after a crash. Examples include imminent crash braking, automatic seat position adjustment, automatic head restraint adjustment and advanced adaptive restraints. NHTSA plans to monitor these technologies, determine their potential safety benefits and evaluate if incorporating them into NCAP would accelerate their deployment in the market.

Finally, NHTSA intends to enhance the presentation of the NCAP ratings. The first step is to implement a summary crash rating and eventually transition to one overall rating that will incorporate crashworthiness and crash avoidance star ratings. This rating would incorporate front, side and rollover ratings, and take into account the number of recommended safety technologies a vehicle has. The information may be presented on a 1 to 100 scale.

Whether NHTSA makes all these changes or not, its NCAP ratings are valuable information for car buyers and they should be weighed when making a new vehicle purchase.