Abstract: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the 2010 version of New
Car Assessment Program (NCAP) in 2008, which has been used since 2011. This paper analyzes the new
NHTSA-NCAP to provide technical supports and references for vehicle models of Great Wall Motor Co., Ltd or
other companies who want to enter the U.S. vehicle market. The result s show that major changes take place
in increasing new testing projects, applying new test dummies, optimizing associated injury criteria, assessing
star rating, and so on. A model which has passed the 2011 NHTSA-NCAP star rating was used as an example
to assign its star rating according to the analytical content, and was then compared to the results posted on the
NHTSA official website to validate the analytical content’s correctness. The results show that more attention
should be paid to the vehicle’s rollover resistance performance.

Key words: vehicle safety, US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), New Car Assessment
Program (NCAP), injury risk curves, relative risk score (RRS), vehicle safety score (VSS)