WASHINGTON -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will gather comments at a public meeting next month on how to improve a program that helps consumers make decisions on new-vehicle purchases by providing comparative information on the safety of vehicles.
The agency is nearly two years behind schedule meeting a congressional mandate to list crash avoidance information next to crashworthiness information on new-vehicle window stickers.
The New Car Assessment Program, or NCAP, crash-tests new vehicles every year and rates them on a five-star scale on how well they protect occupants in frontal, side and rollover crashes. The ratings are displayed on the vehicle pricing label and on NHTSA's safercar.gov website. A checklist of standard and optional advanced crash avoidance technology systems, such as autonomous emergency braking and rearview cameras, is displayed on website searches for a particular vehicle. In late 2015, Congress required that those technologies also be included on the vehicle price stickers.
The meeting will take place Sept. 14 at the Department of Transportation's headquarters and will include discussion of 2015 NHTSA proposals to upgrade NCAP with new crash test protocols, evaluation of new technologies not currently rated and better ways to disseminate information about advanced active safety systems. The agency held listening sessions and received comments about NCAP modernization, but stakeholders complained the process was rushed and too informal for such a complex, technical matter.
