Qualcomm credited its driving stack in the BMW iX3's five-star Euro NCAP rating

Qualcomm said on August 17 that Snapdragon Ride Pilot, the driver-assistance stack it co-developed with BMW, had contributed to the five-star Euro NCAP rating awarded to the BMW iX3. The rating itself was published on July 8, 2026, and Euro NCAP does not attribute performance to named suppliers; the account of the stack’s role is Qualcomm’s.

The company said the system enabled two of the four stages the 2026 protocol scores, Safe Driving and Crash Avoidance. It described Snapdragon Ride Pilot as built on a centralized, scalable compute architecture whose capabilities can be extended through an automaker’s over-the-air update process, with a feature set ranging from collision avoidance and lane keeping up to hands-free highway driving, and said updates can be used to keep pace with changing regulation over a vehicle’s life.

Euro NCAP’s published result records the iX3 50 xDrive in left-hand drive at 73 percent for Safe Driving, 83 percent for Crash Avoidance, 86 percent for Crash Protection and 95 percent for Post Crash Safety. The two stages Qualcomm named are the ones that assess software behavior rather than structure: Safe Driving covers occupant monitoring, distraction and fatigue detection, driver engagement, and speed and steering assistance, while Crash Avoidance covers autonomous emergency braking, emergency lane keeping, blind spot monitoring and cyclist dooring.

Qualcomm characterized the 2026 protocols as Euro NCAP’s largest revision since the overall rating system was introduced in 2009, and said five stars are harder to earn as a result.

Why it matters: The 2026 protocol folds assisted-driving behavior into the star rating itself, which is why a silicon supplier now has a reason to claim part of a crash-test score.

Source: Qualcomm, August 17, 2026. Rating and stage scores: Euro NCAP, BMW iX3 2026.