Effectiveness Analysis of NCAP(New Car Assessment Program) on Traffic Safety

New Car Assessment Program(NCAP) provides consumers with vehicle safety information, primarily front and side crash rating results, and more recently rollover ratings, to aid consumers in their vehicle purchase decisions. NCAP is a system to improve driver and passenger safety by providing market incentives for vehicle manufacturers to voluntarily design their vehicles to better protect drivers and passengers in a crash and be less susceptible to rollover, rather than by regulatory directives. NCAP have been performed since 1999 in Korea by the government in order to reduce fatalities and injuries caused by traffic accidents. Although as the number of vehicles models increases, more vehicle models are required to be test and NCAP is evaluated as a valuable system for vehicle safety, the expansion of the system is slow. It looks like that the benefit of NCAP quantitatively was not verified. In this study, based on the idea that the benefit of the NCAP is defined as the decrease of traffic accident severity by improving vehicle safety, a methodology to analyze the effectiveness of NCAP quantitatively in terms of traffic safety was developed. According to the developed methodology, the reduced numbers of fatalities and injuries were 1.51 and 466 in 2005.