NHTSA graded 102 vehicle models on pedestrian safety for the first time ever

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration graded vehicles on pedestrian safety for the first time ever on September 18, 2026, and 102 vehicle models from 10 manufacturers met the new criteria in that inaugural round. The results now appear as a new category inside NHTSA’s existing 5-Star Safety Ratings for model year 2027 vehicles.

NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said the goal is to change what shoppers can compare before they buy. “By adding a new category for pedestrian safety, [NHTSA] will help consumers make informed choices when buying a new or used vehicle,” he said.

10 Manufacturers Cleared the New Bar

The 102 models NHTSA credited span a wide range of the market. Reporting on the results named Subaru, Toyota, Lexus, Infiniti, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Acura and Honda among the qualifying brands, alongside Hyundai, Kia, Tesla and Ford — a list that runs from mainstream compacts to luxury nameplates rather than clustering around one price segment or vehicle type.

Not every brand qualified in equal measure. According to trade coverage of the results, Tesla and Ford had only minimal representation on the list, with just the Model 3 and the gas-powered Explorer meeting the criteria among each automaker’s full lineup, and not every trim level of a qualifying model line actually earned the rating.

Three Tests Behind Every Pedestrian Rating

The assessment behind the new category runs three separate impact tests rather than one composite score. It measures child and adult headform impacts against the hood and windshield, upper-leg impacts against the leading edge of the hood, and full lower-limb impacts against the bumper, scoring the injury risk each poses to the head, hips, legs and knees. A vehicle’s ratings page now shows a dedicated box for the category, marked to indicate a pass, a fail or a rating still pending.

The category sits alongside NHTSA’s older tests rather than replacing them. Model year 2027 vehicles are still separately scored on frontal, side and rollover crashworthiness, plus crash-avoidance technology such as automatic emergency braking, before the pedestrian result is added to the overall picture NHTSA publishes at nhtsa.gov/ratings.

Morrison, in remarks reported separately by Automotive World, said the point of publishing pass-or-fail results now, rather than waiting for every manufacturer to catch up, is to push the rest of the market toward the same hood and bumper redesigns already found on the 102 qualifying models. He said NHTSA expects the new rating “to spark thoughtful inclusion of new pedestrian safety designs in more models, making new vehicles safer than ever.”

The Pedestrian Toll Behind the New Category

Pedestrian deaths are the backdrop NHTSA cites for expanding its rating system into vehicle design in the first place. The agency’s own pedestrian-safety data show 7,080 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic crashes in 2024, with more than 71,000 more injured — a rate of roughly one death every 74 minutes. That figure has climbed for more than a decade even as overall traffic fatalities have leveled off, which is part of why NHTSA frames hood and bumper design as unfinished business rather than a solved problem inside its broader safety program.

NHTSA’s broader “safe system” approach lists vehicle design as one of five components, alongside safer speeds, roads, road users and post-crash care, that the agency says have to move together to bring that pedestrian death toll down. The agency’s guidance to drivers in the meantime is narrower and more immediate: using wider mirror settings to cut blind spots, slowing down at night when pedestrians are harder to see, and checking twice before backing out of a driveway or parking space, steps NHTSA says matter regardless of how a given vehicle scores on the new hood and bumper tests.

A Category Added to an Old Rating System

The 5-Star Safety Ratings program that pedestrian protection now joins dates to 1993 and was built around occupant protection: frontal crashes at 35 mph, side barrier and side pole impacts, and a rollover-resistance score based on vehicle stability. Pedestrian outcomes had no place in that scoring until this year’s inaugural round, even though the underlying research on hood and bumper geometry predates the announcement by years.

Automakers had pushed back on the pace of that rollout before the results shipped. John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, argued in comments reported alongside the results that “NHTSA isn’t rating new safety technologies fast enough or often enough” to give consumers a current picture of what is actually available, framing the September announcement as overdue rather than as evidence the program is moving quickly enough to keep up with vehicle design changes already on the market.

What the September 18 results do not settle is how the 102 qualifying models compare to each other beyond a simple pass mark, since NHTSA’s category currently reports pass, fail or pending rather than a graded score — a distinction that will matter once enough model years accumulate for the rating to show whether pedestrian protection is actually improving industry-wide, or just concentrated in the 10 manufacturers that cleared the bar first.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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