09.11.2022
Euro NCAP publishes the new “Vision 2030: a Safer Future for Mobility”, the dual objective: to identify a development path for increasingly safer vehicles and to establish an objective reference point for European road users.
The roadmap for the next decade puts vehicle safety at the center, but outlines the role Euro NCAP will play in the context of the future mobility landscape, committing itself to promoting safe vehicles that also reflect the diversity of the European population (height, age, habits, etc.).
The main novelty of Vision 2030 is to modify and expand the Euro NCAP assessment approach, considering all the “strategic” areas of interest of the new vehicles on the European market.
Starting from the technological change of new vehicles, with a strong presence of devices for assisted and automatic driving, the key areas of the Euro NCAP assessment, in force since 2018 – occupant protection, child protection, protection of vulnerable users and active safety systems – will be modified according to four distinct phases of a potential accident:
• driving safely (driving safety);
• accident prevention (active safety);
• impact protection (passive safety);
• post-accident safety.
The modification of the evaluation scheme will start in 2026, with scheduled updates of the Euro NCAP protocols every three years. The other main innovations of the Euro NCAP assessments, pending 2030, concern:
• gradual introduction of virtual tests;
• increasing attention to the protection of vulnerable users (pedestrians and cyclists);
• promotion of driver monitoring systems with bonus / malus in the evaluation;
• promotion of assistive technology for speed control;
• improvement of the quality of simulated accident scenarios in the evaluation of driver assistance systems;
• assessment of the quality of human-machine interaction (HMI);
• promotion of V2V, V2I and V2X communication technologies (vehicle with vehicle, vehicle with the road, vehicle with everything around it);
• greater attention in passive safety tests to diversity by gender and by age (different consequences in the event of an accident);
• assessment of the risk of fire and thermal instability for electric and hybrid vehicles;
• promoting the availability of information for first aid;
• promotion of best practices in vehicle safety and data access.
Euro NCAP will then develop new safety assessment programs for motorcycles and “two-wheeled motor” scooters (as well as light and heavy commercial vehicles), seeking to improve reading and understanding of fatal and / or serious injuries road accidents that they see them involved.
“The results achieved by Euro NCAP, in its 25 years of history, are there for all to see, but we must not let our guard down – said Angelo Sticchi Damiani, president of the Automobile Club of Italy. The goal of zero victims on the roads requires Euro NCAP to insist on the road traced and the new “Vision 2030” is proof of this. I fully agree with the approach that Euro NCAP wants to use to penalize / reward those vehicles that will adopt effective and efficient technologies for assisted driving which, tomorrow, we hope will be automatic. A special thanks to the manufacturers, in fact, only with their collaboration can we obtain the ambitious results that we have set out to pursue “.