Assessment of Child Occupant Protection in ASEAN NCAP

Abstract

Statistics show that child traffic injuries are a public health problem globally, including Southeast Asia (SEA) region. With an overall value of road traffic death rate among children of 7.4 per 100,000 populations has put SEA as the second region to have the highest death rate after Africa. Due to this alarming figure, many safety interventions and inventions have been introduced and implemented to mitigate child injuries resulted from road traffic accidents. One of them is the establishment of crashworthiness rating programme for new passenger cars to evaluate the resulted child injuries via destructive tests. The New Car Assessment Programme for Southeast Asia region (ASEAN NCAP) established to elevate vehicle safety standards, raise consumer awareness and encourage market for saver vehicles in the dedicated region. Currently the programme assessed and rated passenger cars based on performance of adult and child occupant protection in frontal offset crash tests. Since its introduction, ASEAN NCAP has crash tested 28 popular passenger cars throughout its development phases. During these phases, there has been improvement on the rating of child occupant protection (COP) with the increase of number of cars getting 4-star. This paper presents the results of ASEAN NCAP tests for the development phases in term of COP rating as well as provides explanation on the related assessment.