The New Car Assessment Program for Southeast Asian Countries (ASEAN NCAP) launched its new assessment protocol for 2021-2025 last year. The third assessment protocol (2021-2025) comprises four pillars of assessment: Adult Occupant Protection (AOP), Child Occupant Protection (COP), Safety Assist (SA), and Motorcyclist Safety (MS).

Under the SA domain, ASEAN NCAP will be assessing the effectiveness of Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system fitted inside the assessed vehicle. AEB is a braking system that is applied automatically by the vehicle in response to the detection of a likely collision in order to reduce the vehicle speed and potentially avoid such collision. ASEAN NCAP will be assessing two types of AEB system in the upcoming protocol that are AEB City and AEB Inter-Urban.

With the new protocol set to commence this coming January 2021, ASEAN NCAP is preparing to strengthen its capacity and capability in the area of testing the effectiveness of AEB system. This is a significant milestone in ASEAN NCAP assessment as currently (under the 2017-2020 protocol), the assessed vehicle only received points based on the availability of the system inside the vehicle. Thus, ASEAN NCAP is moving a step further by including the actual assessment of the systems in order to ensure that it is effective to stop the moving vehicle based on the following criteria:

• Assessment on the effectiveness of AEB City system in a car-to-car rear stationary by driving the assessed vehicle forward at a speed of 10–60 km/h towards another stationary vehicle.
• Assessment on the effectiveness of AEB Inter-Urban system in a car-to-car rear moving by driving the assessed vehicle forward at a speed of 30–60 km/h towards another vehicle that is travelling at constant speed.

ASEAN NCAP conducted the AEB development test for two consecutive days, 15th-16th July 2020 at the Sg. Besi Airstrip in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This is the second development test that ASEAN NCAP is conducting in our effort to strengthen our assessment procedure on new vehicles sold in the South East Asia market. The first development test was held in 2018 in which ASEAN NCAP tested the effectiveness of blind spot technology fitted inside vehicles in order to detect the presence of motorcyclists riding at the blind spot zone of the moving vehicle.