Model 3 earns 5-Star Safety Rating from Euro NCAP

At Tesla, we’re deeply committed to safety, which is why we engineered Model 3 to be the safest car ever built. In the U.S., Model 3 has already earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), including earning 5-stars in every category and sub-category, and scoring the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program.

Today, Model 3’s safety record continues in Europe, where it has just been awarded a 5-star rating from the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). The Programme’s four categories – each of which Model 3 earned 5-stars in – evaluate a car’s ability to protect adults, children, vulnerable road users like cyclists and pedestrians, as well as its safety assistance features. In this latter “Safety Assist” category, which evaluates a car’s active safety features including its ability to avoid accidents, mitigate injuries and prevent drivers from unintentionally drifting out of their lane, Model 3 earned the highest score that Euro NCAP has awarded to date under their 2018/2019 testing protocols.

Euro NCAP’s results demonstrate the impact of recent improvements made to our Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system that were extended to all Model S, Model X and Model 3 cars built since October 2016 via an over-the-air software update earlier this year. They also reflect important safety improvements made with new features like Lane Departure Avoidance, Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance, and conditional speed limits based on time of day and weather conditions.

Tesla’s engineers developed each active safety feature evaluated by Euro NCAP by leveraging the real-world data collected from the sensor suite of every Tesla vehicle made since October 2016, coupled with data from billions of inputs from actual drivers to help us understand how drivers behave in dynamic scenarios. This data gives us a more precise understanding of the environment around our cars and the different ways that accidents happen, allowing us to more accurately predict when an accident is likely to occur and deploy automated technology to mitigate or avoid it.

In addition to recognizing the benefits of active safety features enabled by data and technology, the Euro NCAP results also demonstrate the importance of Model 3’s all-electric architecture and powertrain design, which ensures the structural integrity of the vehicle and protects occupants with its fortified battery pack, rigid passenger compartment, and overall low center of gravity.

Model 3 is our most affordable car yet, and safety is something that is paramount to all drivers. That’s why we engineered Model 3 from the ground up with the strongest structure, best occupant restraint system and the most advanced safety features that we could imagine, with a goal of getting as many of them on the road as possible. As Model 3 continues to earn the highest safety ratings around the globe, we hope that it translates into one very important point for our customers – peace of mind knowing that their car is helping them drive safely.