The Tesla Model 3 is just beginning to take on the European market, and to make sure it’s safe for the roads across the pond, the region’s collision safety advocates, the Euro NCAP, recently put the electric vehicle through a series of rigorous tests.
Handily, the Tesla Model 3 earned a five-star rating for overall crashworthiness throughout all of Euro NCAP’s testing. That’s all down to the car’s integral design where engineers make the passenger cell incredibly strong and safe, not just in an effort to keep occupants out of harm’s way, but to also protect the battery pack which sits in the floorboard. The same design elements are passed on from the Model S to the Model 3.
Euro NCAP is one of the toughest critics for collision safety in all of the automotive industry and it’s essentially Europe’s regulatory version of our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
According to the video’s description, the list of tests includes:
- A frontal impact test, in which the car impacts a rigid barrier
- An offset frontal impact test, where 40 percent of the width of the car is striking a deformable barrier
- A pole test, in which the tested car is propelled sideways into a rigid pole
- A side impact test, where a mobile deformable barrier impacts the driver’s door
Tesla Model 3 sales were off to a bit of a rough start as the cars made the long trip across the pond to meet the strong demand in Norway and the Netherlands. So far, the automaker reports that it has shipped around 88,000 cars to the region in the last three months through June.