A CAR SAFETY PROGRAMME

Good morning everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Gordon Waters. I’m here to talk about the New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP). First of all, I’m going to tell you something about the history of the NCAP. Then I’ll talk about its passive vehicle safety programme. There’ll be time for questions at the end.

So, firstly, let’s look at the NCAP’s history. It was founded in 1997 and brings me on to my next point – the passive vehicle safety in Europe and America. Its aim is to provide the customer with an opportunity to compare passive vehicle safety in different car models. Just so that everyone’s clear about the terminology, when I say passive vehicle safety, I mean those features used if an accident happens. Features which are used to avoid an accident are referred to as active vehicle safety. One important feature of the programme is tests themselves. As you can see in this side, the programme first tested vehicles in a head-on collision with a rigid wall at 64km/h. in this side-on crash, a 1.5m wide deformable barrier weighing 950kg is rammed into the side of the car at 50km/h. A vehicle can be awarded up to five stars, depending on how it performs in the tests.

Four dummies are used inside the car in the test. The driver and front passenger dummies not only measure the usual injury criteria, such as head, thorax, pelvic acceleration and thigh pressure, but also neck pressure, thorax deformation, knee displacement and lower leg pressure. At the rear are two smaller dummies in children’s seats. A further test assesses the injury risk for pedestrians. So, I think that covers everything about the tests.

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