Every EV Bharat NCAP has crash-tested has won five stars

Bharat NCAP's public ratings table lists the Maruti Suzuki Baleno twice. One row, fitted with six airbags, scores 26.52 out of 32 for adult occupant protection. The row beneath it, the same hatchback with two airbags instead, scores 24.04, a nine-point swing from a change nobody driving the car would notice until the day it matters. Read the rest of the table alongside those two rows and a sharper pattern appears: every electric car India's safety regulator has crash-tested, eleven results across nine separate models, has come back with five stars for both adult and child occupant protection. Not one has missed. Every result that has missed sits on a combustion or hybrid car.

That gap is not something Bharat NCAP itself has drawn attention to; its website simply lists car after car, oldest to newest, each row its own island. Laid end to end, the 36 results published so far, covering 12 manufacturers since testing opened in October 2023, separate cleanly by powertrain. Combustion and hybrid models supply every one of the programme's five shortfalls. Electric cars supply none. Whether that is proof of anything about how EVs are built, or simply about which EVs a still-voluntary programme has been offered, is worth working out before Bharat NCAP's own protocol changes in ways that stop asking only about cabin structure.

01What Bharat NCAP actually tests

Bharat NCAP is India's own new-car safety-assessment programme, launched by road transport minister Nitin Gadkari on 22 August 2023 and opened to manufacturers from 1 October that year. It sits under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, run out of the Central Institute of Road Transport in Pune with the Automotive Research Association of India and the International Centre for Automotive Technology as testing partners, and its methodology is codified as Automotive Industry Standard 197. The scheme is voluntary: a manufacturer nominates a model, a base variant is tested, and the resulting rating applies to that variant and whatever others the maker declares equivalent. It runs out of five stars, on separate scales for adult and child occupant protection, alongside a check on fitted safety-assist technology.

The physical tests are a 64 km/h frontal offset impact into a deformable barrier and a 50 km/h side impact. A side pole impact follows at 29 km/h, mandatory for every car, which is not universal practice elsewhere. At launch, Gadkari pitched the programme as industrial policy as much as consumer safety: crash-testing a car abroad cost roughly ₹2.5 crore against roughly ₹60 lakh at CIRT, he said, and building the capability at home was part of the point.

Every hour, we have 47 accidents and 18 deaths, and in 70 percent of the death (cases), the loss of life is in the age group between 18-34 years.

Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, at the Bharat NCAP launch, New Delhi, 22 August 2023

02Where it parts ways with Euro NCAP

Bharat NCAP is often described in Indian coverage as this country's Euro NCAP, and it shares real lineage: its designers have said they drew on more than a decade of Euro NCAP's own protocol development. But the two tests are not interchangeable. Bharat NCAP's frontal test fires a single car into a fixed offset barrier at 64 km/h. Euro NCAP retired that approach for a mobile progressive deformable barrier, in which the car and the barrier each close at 50 km/h, a higher-energy impact than the raw speed number implies. Euro NCAP's side-impact barrier speed was raised from 50 km/h to 60 km/h in its most recent protocol revision; Bharat NCAP's has stayed at 50. On one specific point Bharat NCAP is the stricter of the two: it makes the pole impact mandatory for every car, where several other NCAP programmes still treat it as optional.

The scoring bars differ as well. Industry reporting puts Bharat NCAP's five-star cut-off at roughly 27 of 32 points for adult protection and 41 of 49 for child protection [1], thresholds consistent with where the published scores actually split into four- and five-star results. Euro NCAP, working across a larger and older fleet, rated a record 108 cars in 2025, of which 98% scored four stars or better, in a test pool that was already more than 58% battery-electric. Bharat NCAP's own sample runs the other way: of the 36 results published so far, 11 are electric and 25 are not, and it is the electric minority posting the perfect record.

03The scorecard, read in full

Since testing opened, Bharat NCAP has published 36 results across 33 nameplates from 12 manufacturers: Tata, Mahindra, Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Honda, Skoda, Citroen, Nissan, Renault and VinFast. In a Lok Sabha reply in December 2025, the road transport ministry put the count at 27 ratings from nine manufacturers [2]; Nissan, Renault and VinFast have all joined in the months since, which suggests the voluntary programme is still gaining participants rather than settling into a fixed roster.

Run every published result by powertrain and the split holds without exception. All eleven electric-car results, from the Tata Punch.ev and Nexon.EV through the Mahindra XEV 9e and BE 6 to the VinFast VF6 and VF7, score five stars for both adult and child occupant protection, including two of the only three perfect 32-out-of-32 adult scores the programme has recorded, on the Tata Harrier.EV and the Mahindra XEV 9e. Of the 25 non-electric results, five miss a five-star mark somewhere: the Citroen C3 Aircross and Honda Amaze on child protection alone, the Citroen Basalt and both airbag variants of the Maruti Baleno on both scores. The Kia Seltos remains the highest-scoring combustion car in the programme at 31.70 of 32 for adult protection, a fraction of a point off perfect and still short of a ceiling every electric car tested has already touched or come within half a point of.

04The 2027 protocol raises the bar

The current protocol runs until September 2027. A draft published in November 2025 replaces the three-part adult/child/safety-assist score with a single 100-point rating spread across five pillars: crash protection worth 55 points, vulnerable-road-user protection worth 20, safe-driving technology and accident-avoidance technology worth 10 points each, and post-crash safety worth 5. Physical crash tests rise from three to five, adding a full-width frontal impact and a rear-impact test to the existing offset-frontal, side and pole assessments. Electronic stability control and curtain airbags become mandatory for any car seeking a rating at all, and a five-star car will no longer be allowed a zero on any single pillar. It can no longer post a strong crash-protection score and skip the rest.

Twenty of the new 100 points sit on vulnerable-road-user protection, the pillar Bharat NCAP has never scored before: pedestrians and two-wheeler riders, who account for the majority of India's road fatalities. The five-star threshold rises alongside it: 70 of 100 points from October 2027, climbing to 80 from October 2029. A heavier car with a stiffer, battery-reinforced floor has an easier time posting a perfect occupant-protection score than it does minimising what happens to whoever is on the other side of the bumper, and Bharat NCAP 2.0 is the first version of the programme built to put a number on that trade-off.