How to read NHTSA crash ratings
Five stars is not five stars. The rating compares a vehicle against others of similar weight, so a five-star small car and a five-star large SUV did not survive the same test — and the agency says so plainly.
Last reviewed September 2026
NHTSA's New Car Assessment Program crash-tests vehicles and publishes star ratings. Unlike almost everything else on this site, this is a genuine score: it comes from a physical test with a published methodology and the agency's name on it, rather than being inferred from how many people filed a complaint.
That makes it the most trustworthy number here, and also the one most often misused.
What is actually tested
| Rating | The test | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Frontal crash | Head-on into a fixed barrier at 35 mph | Injury risk to a driver and front passenger, both belted |
| Side crash | A moving barrier into the side, plus a pole test | Injury risk to driver and rear passenger |
| Rollover | A calculated resistance measure plus a dynamic manoeuvre | How likely the vehicle is to roll, not how it fares if it does |
| Overall | A weighted composite of the above | A single summary figure |
- Frontal crash
- The test:
- Head-on into a fixed barrier at 35 mph
- What it measures:
- Injury risk to a driver and front passenger, both belted
- Side crash
- The test:
- A moving barrier into the side, plus a pole test
- What it measures:
- Injury risk to driver and rear passenger
- Rollover
- The test:
- A calculated resistance measure plus a dynamic manoeuvre
- What it measures:
- How likely the vehicle is to roll, not how it fares if it does
- Overall
- The test:
- A weighted composite of the above
- What it measures:
- A single summary figure
Note what rollover is: a measure of propensity. It answers “how likely is this to tip”, not “what happens to the occupants when it does”. It is the one star rating that is not an injury measure.
The rule almost everyone breaks
Frontal crash ratings may only be compared between vehicles of similar weight — NHTSA's own guidance is within about 250 pounds, and in the same class. This is not a technicality. The test drives the car into a fixed barrier, so the forces involved depend on the vehicle's own mass. A small car earning five stars protected its occupants well in a small car's crash, which is not the crash a three-ton SUV has.
“Not Rated” is not zero stars
NHTSA does not test every trim of every model year — testing is expensive and the programme is a sample. A vehicle with no rating, or a rating on some dimensions and not others, is entirely ordinary.
An untested vehicle and a vehicle that performed badly are completely different claims, and collapsing the first into the second invents a failing crash result out of an absence of data. This site carries them as distinct states and renders “Not rated” rather than a zero or a blank — a missing section reads as reassurance, and an absence of testing is not a result.
Ratings from different eras are not comparable
NHTSA substantially revised the programme for the 2011 model year: tougher tests, a side pole test added, a new overall score, and revised injury criteria. Ratings from 2011 onwards are deliberately harder to earn than those before it.
So a 2009 model showing five stars and a 2015 showing four have not been measured on the same scale, and the older number is not evidence of a better car. Compare within an era, and be suspicious of any table that ranks vehicles across that boundary.
NHTSA is not the only tester, and the two disagree
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety runs a separate programme with different tests — notably the small overlap frontal test, which strikes a corner of the car rather than the full width, and which several vehicles with five NHTSA stars have handled poorly.
The programmes are complementary rather than competing, and IIHS ratings are free to look up. A vehicle rated well by both has cleared two different bars; one rated well by only one has cleared one. This site reports NHTSA only, because that is the source it aggregates.
What the stars do not cover
- Crash avoidance. The star ratings are about surviving a crash. Automatic emergency braking and lane keeping are listed separately by NHTSA and are not in the stars.
- Rear passengers in a frontal impact. The frontal test instruments the front seats.
- Children and older occupants. Test dummies represent particular adult sizes.
- Real-world crashes. Two standardised impacts are not the distribution of crashes that actually happen.
- The condition of a used car. A rating describes a model as built and tested, not the specific vehicle in front of you after a decade and a possible repair.
Reading them well
- Compare within a class and a similar weight, or not at all.
- Compare within a testing era — 2011 onwards is its own scale.
- Read “Not Rated” as untested, never as a poor result.
- Look at the individual dimensions, not only the overall composite: a strong overall can carry a weaker rollover figure.
- Check IIHS as well; the small overlap test finds things the NHTSA battery does not.
Official ratings for any tested vehicle are at nhtsa.gov/ratings, which is where the figures shown here come from.