Euro NCAP 2026: What’s Changing and How to Stay Compliant

The European New Car Assessment Program is a voluntary consumer rating program that tests and scores vehicles to show how safe they are beyond the legal minimum. UNECE regulations in comparison are mandatory legal standards that a vehicle must meet to be sold and registered. For OEMs, achieving a high NCAP rating enhances consumer trust, drives purchase decisions, and strengthens market competitiveness. The 2026 protocol has four pillars: crash protection, active safety, vulnerable road user protection, and post-crash behavior.

The new protocol expands both the scope of testing and the expectations placed on manufacturers, reflecting the shift from reactive crash safety toward a holistic safety ecosystem.

The most important changes include:

• Crash Avoidance: Unified protocols with new motorcycle and junction scenarios, higher speeds, emergency steering, and robustness testing under degraded conditions.
• Crash Protection & Post-Crash: Tougher crash and vulnerable road user (VRU) tests, plus a new post-crash score for rescue sheets, advanced eCall, multi-collision braking, and EV isolation.
• Safe Driving: A new 100-point category covering occupant monitoring, driver engagement, and vehicle assistance. Road validation stretches to 2,000 km for speed functions, and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and steering test scenarios.
• Virtual Testing: Simulation accepted under strict rules to complement proving ground validation, with dossier submission and spot-check verification.

Taken together, these changes make Euro NCAP 2026 a complete lifecycle assessment of safety performance. To earn 5 stars, vehicles must not only withstand crashes but also prevent them, keep drivers engaged and attentive, and support effective rescue afterward – all validated through a combination of physical and virtual testing.

Euro NCAP has released its latest Crash Avoidance Protocols v1.0, marking a significant evolution in how vehicle safety systems are assessed. Compared to the previous Car-to-Car (C2C), Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) and Lane Support System (LSS) protocols, the new documents reflect a broader, more realistic, and more integrated approach to evaluating advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Crash Avoidance protocols have been unified into three integrated areas: 

• The Frontal Collision Protocol expands far beyond traditional C2C testing. It includes new motorcyclist as well as turning and junction scenarios, and evaluates steering-based functions such as Emergency Steering Support (ESS) and Autonomous Emergency Steering (AES). Additionally, scoring is linked to driver monitoring, ensuring systems respond not only to external hazards but also to the driver’s state of attention.
• The Lane Departure Protocol reflects the growing importance of lateral control in ADAS. It now evaluates Emergency Lane Keeping (ELK) and Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) under diverse conditions, with test speeds increased to 130 km/h for the VUT and 140 km/h for the Global Vehicle Target. A new drivability assessment examines system–driver interaction, while robustness testing covers lane marking variations and night-time operation.
• The Low-Speed Collision Protocol targets urban safety, where vulnerable road users are most at risk. It introduces Door Opening Warning (DOW) to prevent cyclist accidents, reverse maneuver tests with children, and new junction crossing scenarios. More precise virtual impact zones improve the modeling of collision points and speeds, placing greater emphasis on protecting pedestrians and cyclists in everyday traffic.

Across all three protocols, Euro NCAP 2026 introduces more rigorous and standardized scoring, with robustness testing under real-world variability, full ISO alignment, and a shift toward evaluating a system’s ability to anticipate collisions – supported by new methods that compare predicted and actual test results.

Strengthening Structural and Occupant Safety

The 2026 protocol expands Crash Protection with more detailed assessments across frontal, side, far-side, and VRU impacts, complemented by virtual and sled testing. Results are interconnected: weaknesses in one area can reduce scores overall.

• Frontal Impact: Mobile Progressive Deformable Barrier offset and Full Width Tests at 50 km/h, assessing driver, passenger, and child protection.
• Side Impact: Advanced European Mobile Deformable Barrier at 60 km/h plus pole tests to evaluate head and thorax safety.
• Far-Side Impact: Focus on occupant-to-occupant interaction and center airbag performance.
• VRU Impact: Protection for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists through optimized front-end design and sensing technologies.
• Virtual & Sled Testing: Broaden coverage of restraint systems under varied speeds and conditions.

Together, these updates ensure vehicles are assessed not only for structural strength but also for their ability to protect all occupants and vulnerable road users in diverse real-world crash situations.

AVL Insight: To secure strong results, manufacturers must integrate crash safety early in development. Structural design tools help balance crash zones, restraint systems need to be optimized from the start, and pedestrian protection must be considered already in styling. Early, holistic planning is essential to achieve top ratings.

Enabling Effective Rescue and Recovery

Euro NCAP 2026 introduces Post-Crash Safety as a dedicated category, contributing up to 100 points. It evaluates how effectively a vehicle supports rescue operations and protects occupants after a collision, ensuring critical systems remain functional even under severe crash conditions.

• Rescue Information: ISO 17840-compliant rescue sheets must be available in multiple languages and clearly indicate airbags, high-voltage components, and safe cutting zones, supported by emergency response guides covering all powertrain types.
• Post-Crash Intervention: Advanced eCall must transmit reliable crash data, including occupant count and crash severity, while multi-collision braking and automatic hazard activation are required to prevent secondary impacts.
• Vehicle Extrication: Vehicles must enable safe battery isolation for EVs, provide clear hazard labeling, and ensure doors and seatbelts can be released quickly, even after structural deformation.

These requirements connect directly to crash tests: Post-crash systems must still function after full-scale impacts, and eCall data must align with sensor measurements within ±10% tolerance.

AVL Insight: To maximize scores, manufacturers should integrate post-crash safety early in design. Standardized eCall, accurate rescue documentation, accessible restraints, and visible high-voltage labeling are essential to ensure quick and effective rescue operations under Euro NCAP 2026.

The new Safe Driving Protocol focuses on continuous support, not just emergencies. It asks how effectively vehicles help drivers stay in control during daily use – highways, interurban roads, and long-distance journeys.

Safe Driving is structured around three assessment areas. 

• Occupant Monitoring ensures vehicles detect and respond to seatbelt misuse, out-of-position passengers, and child presence, with escalating warnings and even automatic interventions if needed.
• Driver Engagement verifies that the driver remains actively involved, using monitoring systems to detect distraction, drowsiness, or unresponsiveness, while intuitive HMI design reduces gaze diversion and prevents over-reliance on automation.
• Vehicle Assistance evaluates everyday support features, including speed adaptation, adaptive cruise control, and steering assistance, ensuring these systems work reliably across cars, powered two-wheelers, and vulnerable road users in varied traffic environments.

Unlike crash avoidance, which targets emergencies, Safe Driving focuses on realistic, long-distance scenarios. For example, Speed Limit Information Functions (SLIF) must be validated over 2,000 km of road testing, while Assisted Speed Limiters (ASL) are assessed across 400 km, with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) testing accepted. 

AVL Insight: To meet these demands, manufacturers should integrate Driver Monitoring concepts early in vehicle design, planning camera and sensor placement from the start. Multimodal detection – combining visual, behavioral, and physical inputs – strengthens robustness. Systems must be fitted as standard across the model range, with occupant data aligned to crash test and eCall outputs. Finally, child presence detection represents both a compliance requirement and an opportunity to reinforce brand reputation through innovation.

Safe Driving 2026 redefines vehicle assistance as a proactive layer of safety. It challenges OEMs to design systems that are not only technically accurate but also intuitive and trustworthy, keeping drivers engaged while preventing risk in everyday traffic.

For the first time, Euro NCAP formally accepts virtual testing as part of compliance. Physical proving grounds remain critical, but simulation now provides a scalable way to cover countless scenarios that would be impractical or too costly to reproduce in the real world.

• Workflow: To participate, OEMs must submit a simulation dossier that details model setup, sensor configurations, and algorithms. During in-house qualification, KPIs and scoring results from virtual scenarios compared against physical benchmarks. If results align within defined tolerances, Euro NCAP validates the approach through spot checks.
• Qualification criteria: Results must fall within strict error limits (e.g., ±1.0 KPI deviation; scoring comparisons within 0.5) for both standard and extended scenarios. At least 75% of spot test results must meet qualification standards for each scenario cluster.
• Simulation model requirements: Models for perception, vehicle dynamics, and ADAS functions must reflect real-world parameters such as mass, width, and sensor placement. Perfect perception may be assumed, but dynamics models must include the relevant behaviors for the test scenarios.

By formally recognizing virtual testing, the new protocol enables manufacturers to scale safety validation to a new level. Physical proving grounds remain essential, but simulation now allows manufacturers to cover far more scenarios, validate system robustness, and prepare for complex real-world conditions in a cost-efficient, standardized way.

AVL’s Virtual Testing Solution bridges virtual and physical ADAS/AD testing, enabling the validation of Euro NCAP 2026 scenarios at scale with reproducible, cost-efficient simulations. With AVL SCENIUS™, identical tests can be executed across different execution environments, results are collected automatically, and deviations are compared to ensure compliance within defined tolerances.

Despite the rise of simulation, proving ground testing is still essential for Euro NCAP 2026 compliance. Robustness testing requires repeatable, controlled execution of complex scenarios, including variable speeds, target behaviors, lighting, and weather conditions.

This requires a sophisticated infrastructure: GPS-guided soft targets, robotic platforms, synchronized steering and braking controllers, and real-time sensor diagnostics. Without such facilities, OEMs risk inconsistent results and credibility gaps that compromise their ratings.