Secretary Anthony Foxx

New Car Assessment Program Announcement

Changes to Five-Star Safety Ratings

Washington, D.C.

December 8, 2015

Hello, everybody. Thank you all for coming out. I am joined today by NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind. And we’re here to share with you our latest effort to protect travelers and boost technology in new vehicles.

This year Americans are on track to buy roughly 17 million cars and light trucks. These folks are looking for a good deal. They’re looking for the right style and optimal number of seats to meet their needs.

But something else Americans look for when they purchase a vehicle is if it got five stars.

This tells them that NHTSA’s New Car Assessment Program has determined that the vehicle was built to very high standards that keep them well protected if a crash occurs.

Today we are proposing to make these standards even tougher. We’re going to raise the bar even higher when it comes to protecting vehicle occupants.

Going forward our crash testing system will use new cutting-edge testing models, and our friend THOR is getting an upgrade too. The end result will be tests that more accurately represent impacts on the human body, which will lead to us a more stringent rating system. And along those lines, we’ll introduce half-star ratings so that consumers can make even more detailed comparisons.

But these are not the only ways we are expanding the five-star rating system. To date, our rating system has only tested the ability of vehicles to protect occupants if a crash occurs. We haven’t rated how well they integrate technology to prevent crashes from ever occurring. We also have never looked at the safety of people outside the car.

But this is about to change. First, we are proposing to create a new category in which vehicles are rated according to their use of as many as nine types of technologies. These technologies range from those intended to prevent rear end crashes, to others that improve a drivers’ nighttime visibility or help drivers with blind spots.

And this new rating system, as I mentioned, will also test how well the design of the vehicle protects pedestrians if they are struck. Given the increases we’ve seen in recent years in people getting hurt or killed while out walking or riding a bicycle, this is a very important step for safety.

So let me say that we are opening our proposed changes to a 60-day public comment period. Consumers can go to safercar.gov to learn more. And before I turn it over to Mark to go into more details, I’ll end by just saying this:

Our goal at the U.S. Department of Transportation is not just to protect people in the event that an accident occurs. We ultimately want to eliminate crashes entirely.

And our data already tells us a powerful story about the ability of new vehicle technology to improve safety and save lives. Earlier this year we put out a report. And the short of it was that between 1960 and 2012, new technology – from seatbelts to electronic stability control – saved more than 600,000 lives.

Now we’re entering a period when the rate of change driven by technology in other sectors of our lives has reached the transportation sector. New technology is now going from prototype to the marketplace quicker than ever before. And this requires us to be agile and nimble enough to safely integrate innovation into our transportation system.

But we also need to put some pressure on automakers to do the following:

First, to implement safety technology that is readily available. And not just in luxury and more expensive vehicles – it needs to be universally available in all models.

And second: to move boldly towards a future in which connected and autonomous vehicles can profoundly change the game for safety and driving as we now know it.

One of the key legacies of the five-star rating system is that it has created an environment where automakers and manufacturers are continuously striving for higher levels of occupant protection. That will continue. However, with these changes, the future of this rating system will also include speeding up the race to make crashes a thing of the past.

Thanks everyone. And I look forward to questions. ###