Japan's car assessment added an intersection braking test against motorcycles

Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism and the National Agency for Automotive Safety and Victims’ Aid published the first result of the 2026 assessment year on October 20, and with it the changes to the protocol behind it.

Two evaluations are new. Collision-damage-mitigation braking is now scored against a scenario drawn from intersection accidents; a footnote specifies that scenarios involving two-wheelers were added, including turns across the path of an oncoming motorcycle. The automatic emergency call device is now evaluated for rear-seat occupants as well. The agencies said the change in what is evaluated carries a change in how points are allocated.

An annex set out the emergency-call tiers. A basic device reports a crash automatically; Advanced Type I adds data for predicting injury to front-seat occupants; Advanced Type II adds information when a rear-seat occupant is wearing a seatbelt. The agencies also began publishing injury figures for child occupants in the rear seat from the new offset frontal crash test, on the agency’s results pages rather than in the release.

Suzuki’s e Vitara, the first model published under the 2026 protocol, took an A rank for preventive safety, a B rank for crash safety and Advanced Type II for its emergency call device, giving it four stars out of five.

The release’s list of the car’s safety equipment is marked as supplied by Suzuki. Per-model point totals are no longer published when a result is released; the annex says that is deliberate, so that the award announcement naming the highest-scoring five-star car each year still carries news.