Why Bharat NCAP exists: the 2014 zero star crash tests explained

Five cars, zero stars

In January 2014, Global NCAP crashed five of India's best selling small cars into a deformable barrier at 64 km/h and filmed what happened. The Maruti Suzuki Alto 800, Tata Nano, Hyundai i10, Ford Figo and Volkswagen Polo were bought off dealer lots in their base, no airbag trims. Three of them, the Alto, the Nano and the i10, had front structures that collapsed so badly that fitting an airbag would not have helped the dummy inside. All five scored zero stars for adult occupant protection. The Polo, retested with two airbags added, jumped to four stars on the same shell. Only the Figo's structure stayed intact enough to scrape past the UN's own 56 km/h minimum.

Global NCAP's then president Max Mosley said at the time that India, already a major car market, was running on crash safety "20 years behind" Europe's five star norm. The five cars tested accounted for roughly a fifth of all new car sales in India that year, so the result was not a fringe finding. It became a front page story, and the start of a campaign called Safer Cars for India, run jointly by Global NCAP and the Institute of Road Traffic Education with funding from the FIA Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

From shame to a law: AIS 098

The government response came through the Automotive Industry Standard AIS 098, India's own version of the UN's offset frontal crash rule, UNECE R94. It made the 56 km/h, 40 percent overlap frontal offset test compulsory, first for new car models from 1 October 2017, then for every model already on sale from 1 October 2019. This closed the gap that had let a car like the Nano reach showrooms with no mandatory crash test behind it at all. It did not, by itself, create a public star rating. A car could pass AIS 098 and still have no number a buyer could compare against a rival.

Nine years later, Bharat NCAP

That gap is why Bharat NCAP exists. Union minister Nitin Gadkari launched it on 6 September 2023, with Global NCAP's president David Ward present at the ceremony, built on the Automotive Industry Standard AIS 197 and running from 1 October 2023. It gives every tested car a star rating for adult occupants and for child occupants, the number missing from the 2017 rule. Unlike the 2014 tests, which were funded and run by an outside charity to force the industry's hand, Bharat NCAP is the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways' own programme, the tenth national NCAP in the world. Its first results, published in December 2023, gave five stars to the Tata Harrier and Tata Safari, the kind of score none of 2014's small cars came close to.

The Bengaluru-built car that proves the point

The clearest sign of how far the floor has moved sits at Toyota Kirloskar Motor's Bidadi plant, just outside Bengaluru. On 2 July 2025, Toyota announced that the Innova HyCross built there had scored five stars from Bharat NCAP for both adult and child occupant protection, the first Toyota model and the first MPV to be rated under the programme. The HyCross is not a niche car. It is the same nameplate family, Innova, that once sold in a far less protected form. The distance between a 2014 zero star hatchback and a 2025 five star, Bengaluru built MPV is the real measure of what that one humiliating set of crash films, and the law and agency that followed it, changed in Indian car safety.

Sources

• Global NCAP: Volkswagen withdraws zero star Polo without airbags
• FIA Foundation: Official Bharat NCAP launched to enhance vehicle safety in India
• Autocar India: Every car, SUV tested by Bharat NCAP so far
• Toyota Bharat: Toyota Innova Hycross secures 5 star safety rating under Bharat NCAP
• Factly: What type of vehicle crash tests are mandatory in India