The Model Y emerged victorious from a 10-car shortlist, with all vehicles selected based primarily on their Euro NCAP test scores, in addition to other safety criteria such as technology innovation, mass-market appeal and Assisted Driving technology performance.
Thatcham Research, the What Car? Safety Award main supporter and co-judge[i], is a major contributor to the Euro NCAP programme, both from a testing and protocol-development perspective.
Tesla’s fully-electric family car achieved the highest overall score of any car tested under Euro NCAP’s latest – and most exacting – protocols. Additionally, the Model Y’s near-perfect 98% Safety Assist score, which relates to the performance of its collision-avoidance systems, is the highest ever recorded by the European safety rating agency.
Thatcham Research’s chief research strategy officer, Matthew Avery, said:
The Tesla Model Y is an impressively high performer. Its Safety Assist score is the best we’ve ever recorded, and its Adult Occupant Protection score of 97% is the best in 2022,
Tesla has made some bold claims about being super safe in the past, and they're really delivering on that promise. In terms of the passive and active safety performance of the Tesla Model Y, there's no safer place to put your family. Credit to Tesla for that.”
The Model Y scored full points in Euro NCAP testing for its lane support system, as did its Collision Avoidance Driver Monitoring system which uses camera-based direct monitoring to detect a distracted driver and automatically changes the sensitivity of the Forward Collision Warning System to be more reactive.
Read the full What Car? Safety Award winner’s press release on our media centre.
Judges are Matthew Avery, chief research strategy officer at Thatcham Research, Michiel van Ratingen, secretary general at Euro NCAP, and Claire Evans, consumer editor at What Car?
Passive safety focuses on impact protection and the performance of seatbelts and airbags, while Active safety focuses on crash-avoidance technologies such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Support Systems (LSS) and Blind Spot Information System (BLIS), amongst others