The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tuesday that it would revise the current ratings system from a single overall score of 1 to 5 into a multi-faceted system that will include the score on crash-avoidance systems and a score on pedestrian safety.
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Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx told WIRED last month that he’d directed NHTSA to review the star ratings.
Along with new, more humanlike crash test dummies and a new “frontal oblique” crash test to simulate an angled front-end crash, NHTSA will introduce improved pedestrian impact tests and an improved frontal crash test to better examine how rear seat occupants fare in a crash.
The rating system, whose origins date to 1978, allows the agency to award up to five stars to vehicles based on crash protection and rollover safety.
The agency also said it would revise the rating system to include additional crash tests and new advanced crash-test dummies with more sensors. Another proposed test would evaluate how well a auto protects a pedestrian from head, leg, and pelvic injuries in the event of a crash involving a pedestrian.
Crash-test dummies and the features they help test are about to get a lot more high-tech. Updates to the nearly 40-year-old safety rating system will give customers better…
The U.S.is proposing adding automatic brakes and other advanced safety features to a five-star rating program for new vehicles, a significant regulatory overhaul that could help spur widespread adoption of driverless-car technologies.
The proposed changes are expected to bring a wider range of star ratings between new vehicles. NHTSA will also rate the performance of emergency braking systems with pedestrian detection.
“The more that consumers hear about our advanced safety technology and its potential benefits, the more likely they will choose that technology when vehicle shopping”, Wade Newton, the group’s spokesman, said in an email. The rules lay out the framework to more quickly update the program to incorporate assessment of new technologies as they are developed and offered to the public.
“But, in a time when vehicle technologies advance at lightning speed, NHTSA must constantly innovate to stay ahead of the pace of change”, Rosekind continued.
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Rear underride crashes are those in which the front end of a vehicle impacts the rear of a generally larger vehicle, and slides under the rear-impacted vehicle, NHTSA said. NHTSA will accept public comment for 60 days before issuing a final regulation.
