Green NCAP rates India-built Suzuki e Vitara 87%, flags its India data

What Green NCAP found on October 29

Green NCAP, the Brussels based lab that scores a car's full lifecycle impact rather than just what comes out of its exhaust, published five fresh ratings on October 29, 2026. The round covered the Tesla Model Y 62.6 kWh RWD, the BYD Dolphin Surf 43 kWh, the Suzuki e VITARA 60 kWh, a Volkswagen Golf 2.0 TDI diesel and a Volkswagen Tayron 1.5 eTSI mild hybrid SUV.

The Model Y scored 93 percent for five stars. Green NCAP's technical manager, Dr Aleksandar Damyanov, said Tesla "merits recognition for transparently sharing production data around the Model Y and battery," letting assessors use verified numbers instead of the generic defaults used when a carmaker stays quiet. The Dolphin Surf scored higher still, 96 percent, also five stars. The diesel Golf scored 69 percent for three and a half stars, the best mark Green NCAP has yet given a combustion car, a rating it says also applies to the Skoda Octavia, Seat Leon and Audi A3 that share its 2.0 TDI engine. The Tayron managed only 41 percent, two and a half stars, with a lifecycle footprint of 263 grams of CO2 equivalent per km against the Model Y's 95 grams.

Why the e VITARA's 87 percent matters here

The car Europe knows as the Suzuki e VITARA is sold in India as the Maruti e Vitara, and both come only from Maruti Suzuki's Hansalpur plant in Gujarat. It scored 87 percent for four and a half stars. Green NCAP's own writeup says the figure "was limited by its weight, 1.8 tonnes, and an LCA profile impacted by the generic assumptions made for production in India."

That sentence is the real story for an Indian reader. Green NCAP builds its sustainability rating from three measures, greenhouse gas emissions, primary energy demand and pollutants, using a model developed by Austria's Joanneum Research and peer reviewed by Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute and by Ricardo, the UK powertrain consultancy. When a factory does not hand the lab its own electricity mix, steel sourcing or battery cell data, the assessment falls back to published country level figures. For a car built on India's coal heavy grid, that default pulls the greenhouse gas part of the score down even though the e Vitara's measured driving efficiency was not flagged as a problem.

Maruti Suzuki began shipping the e Vitara from Hansalpur to Europe in August 2025, sending more than 2,900 units to 12 countries, the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Hungary, Iceland and Belgium, in that first month. The plant has a current capacity of 7,50,000 units a year across three lines, rising to 1 million, and the company has said it expects to export 50,000 to 1,00,000 e Vitaras a year once that ramp is complete, eventually reaching more than 100 markets.

How to follow the ratings from India

Green NCAP buys its test cars anonymously off European dealer forecourts. It runs no lab in India and there is no event here to attend. Every rating it publishes, including the full index breakdown and the PDF test sheet, goes up free on greenncap.com the day it is released. The Hansalpur built e Vitara cannot be retested locally, so the European sheet remains the only independent lifecycle number that exists for it anywhere, and it is worth weighing alongside the car's Bharat NCAP crash rating, which covers only occupant safety, not emissions or energy use.

Sources

• Green NCAP presents its Sustainability Rating for the Tesla Model Y
• LCA Explained, Green NCAP
• Maruti Suzuki e Vitara exports to Europe begin from Gujarat plant, Autocar India