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The Five-Star Rating Does Not Cover the Systems You Recalibrate, and Now It Will Not Until MY2027

The short version. A car can earn five stars and have nothing about its blind spot warning, lane keeping assist or pedestrian braking tested by the government at all. Those systems are not part of the star rating. They sit in a separate recommendation list, marked with a tick rather than a score, and the four newest of them were due to arrive with model year 2026 vehicles. In September 2025 NHTSA postponed them by one model year, to MY2027, after the industry asked for the delay in writing.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-08-18 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

How this page was produced: Researched, drafted and checked with AI assistance under human direction, and signed off by the named author. How this site is written

If you replace a windshield and recalibrate a camera, this is the programme that decides whether the buyer of that car ever saw a public assessment of the system you just put back into alignment.

Stars and ticks are two different things

NCAP has two vocabularies and they are easy to confuse.

Stars go to crash tests. NHTSA's own description is that it assigns star ratings on its website for the original programme elements, which it lists as frontal impact, side impact and rollover assessments. That is the number on the window sticker.

Ticks go to driver assistance. For ADAS, NHTSA says it "uses checkmarks to recommend to consumers those ADAS technologies that meet NCAP's performance requirements." A tick is a recommendation that a system met a requirement. It is not a score, it is not comparative, and one manufacturer's tick does not tell you it performed better than another's.

That distinction is the whole reason the programme keeps getting called a safety rating when the part covering ADAS is not a rating at all.

What was supposed to arrive with MY2026

Two separate final decision notices set it up.

On 3 December 2024 (89 FR 95916) NHTSA announced it would add four ADAS technologies to NCAP: blind spot warning (BSW), blind spot intervention (BSI), lane keeping assist (LKA) and pedestrian automatic emergency braking (PAEB), and would raise the stringency of the existing automatic emergency braking requirements.

On 25 November 2024 (89 FR 93000) it announced a crashworthiness pedestrian protection programme.

Both were to be implemented beginning with model year 2026 vehicles.

The delay, and who asked for it

On 22 September 2025, NHTSA published a notice of postponement (90 FR 45463). Its own words: the changes "will be implemented for model year 2027 vehicles."

The notice is unusually direct about where the request came from. On 25 April 2025 NHTSA received a letter from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, described in the notice as a consortium of vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, asking for a delay of at least one year. The notice lists the four grounds the letter gave:

  1. NHTSA's failure to publish test procedures for evaluating crashworthiness pedestrian protection.
  2. Outstanding technical questions on the final decisions for both the new ADAS technologies and the pedestrian protection programme.
  3. An implementation timeline that limits manufacturer participation by imposing unnecessary barriers.
  4. A lack of comparative ratings to allow consumers to differentiate between the safety performance of vehicles.

NHTSA's stated rationale is that delaying was appropriate "to address concerns expressed by the automotive industry and to provide the Agency with sufficient time to implement the planned changes in a manner that ensures the integrity of the NCAP program is upheld."

Point four is worth sitting with. The industry's fourth objection to a programme that ticks rather than scores was that it does not let consumers tell vehicles apart. That is a criticism of the tick, made by the people the tick is applied to.

What has happened since, which is more than a delay

Two further notices have moved the programme in 2026, and neither is about ADAS arriving sooner.

28 May 2026 (91 FR 31834). A request for comments on adding rear automatic braking with pedestrian avoidance to the recommended ADAS technologies. Comments closed 27 July 2026, after an extension published 23 July 2026 (91 FR 46527).

17 August 2026 (91 FR 53339). A request for comments on removing two legacy test procedures: the Dynamic Rollover Resistance Test, specifically the "Fishhook" manoeuvre, and the Side Air Bag Out-of-Position protocols. NHTSA's position is that these "have achieved their original safety goals," and for rollover it proposes relying instead on the Sine-with-Dwell requirements of FMVSS No. 126 starting with model year 2027 vehicles. The same notice proposes updating the mid-term and long-term parts of NCAP's ten-year roadmap. Comments are open until 16 October 2026.

The part almost nobody knows: some of it runs on attestation

Buried in a footnote of the August 2026 notice is a sentence about how one of those legacy procedures is actually administered.

For the side air bag out-of-position procedure, manufacturers are asked to submit data for up to 30 test positions per vehicle, and NCAP staff "spot-checks performance for approximately 30 to 40 percent of crash-tested models." The footnote adds that starting with model year 2026 vehicles and later, NHTSA only requires that manufacturers attest to passing or failing performance and provide the associated test report numbers.

Read that carefully before repeating it. It describes the SAB-OOP procedure specifically. It is not a statement that the ADAS programme as a whole runs on attestation, and this page does not claim that it does.

What this means if you work on these cars

A tick is not a test result you can lean on. If a customer tells you their car is "rated" for lane keeping, the honest answer is that NCAP does not rate lane keeping. It has not yet started recommending it, and when it does the output is a tick.

MY2027 is the date to hold, not MY2026. Anyone still working from the 2024 notices has the wrong model year.

None of this is a repair standard. NCAP is a consumer information programme. It tells a buyer what a system did in a new vehicle. It says nothing about what your recalibration has to achieve, and nothing about what anyone owes a customer in writing. For that, see what anyone actually has to tell you about windshield recalibration.

What we could not establish

Whether MY2027 will hold. Nothing published since September 2025 moves the date again, but the August 2026 roadmap proposal is open for comment until 16 October 2026 and this page will be re-read after that closes.

How many vehicles carry ticks today. NCAP's vehicle-by-vehicle recommendations live on the consumer-facing site rather than in the Federal Register, and we have not counted them.

Sources, and how we read them

Every document above was read from the Federal Register's developer API, which is the route federalregister.gov designates for programmatic access; its website pages return a bot-check to automated requests, and we did not retry those.

Read on 18 August 2026.

General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.

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