Euro NCAP’s 2028 Safer Trucks protocols will raise expectations for driver monitoring, occupant protection and in-cabin safety. We explore what the changes mean for truck manufacturers and why understanding the driver will become increasingly important for achieving top safety ratings.
Heavy goods vehicles remain one of the most persistent challenges in European road safety. Trucks make up only a small proportion of vehicles on European roads, yet they are involved in a disproportionately high share of fatal crashes.
Euro NCAP’s Safer Trucks program, launched in 2024, has already begun to shift the market by introducing independent star ratings focused primarily on active safety and crash avoidance. From 2028, the organization will raise the bar further, placing greater emphasis on how effectively a truck monitors and supports it’s driver, while beginning to incorporate occupant protection into the overall safety rating.
Full-scale crash testing of trucks is not expected until around 2031, giving manufacturers time to prepare. However, the 2028 protocols represent an important step towards a more holistic assessment of truck safety, combining crash prevention with technologies designed to protect the drivers inside the cabin.
Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS)
Driver monitoring will play an increasingly important role in the 2028 assessment.
Current protocols already evaluate systems designed to detect fatigue and driver distraction, but future requirements will place greater emphasis on system reliability and user acceptance. Continuous monitoring of the driver’s eyes and head position will be rewarded, as will systems capable of using driver-state information to adapt the behavior and sensitivity of the truck’s driver assistance functions.
Additional credit will be available for technologies capable of detecting signs of impairment and responding appropriately when a driver becomes unresponsive, including systems that can bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
The direction is clear: it is no longer enough for a Driver Monitoring System simply to determine whether a driver is looking at the road. Increasingly, the vehicle needs to understand the driver’s state and use that information as part of a broader safety system.
Reliability and User Acceptance
For professional drivers, the effectiveness of a DMS is not only about whether it can detect distraction. It is also about whether it can do so accurately, consistently and without creating unnecessary interruptions.
Euro NCAP plans extensive on-road evaluations designed to assess real-world performance and ensure systems do not generate excessive false warnings.
This is particularly important in commercial vehicles. EU regulations allow professional drivers to drive for up to nine hours per day, extendable to ten hours twice a week, with weekly driving time reaching as much as 56 hours. A DMS may therefore be interacting with the same driver for many hours, day after day.
An occasional false alert in a passenger car may be irritating. A false alert that repeatedly interrupts a professional driver throughout a working day can quickly become a significant source of frustration and may ultimately reduce trust in the system.
This makes robust performance in real-world conditions critical. A successful DMS must understand the normal behaviors of a truck driver and distinguish them from genuine distraction, impairment or loss of attention.
The wider human-machine interface will also come under scrutiny, including the clarity and positioning of essential controls and whether commonly used functions can be accessed without navigating complex menus. Human sensing via the DMS camera can potentially take this further by allowing interfaces to respond naturally to the driver. Neonode’s MultiSensing® platform, for example, can use head-position information to dynamically adjust digital mirror displays, recreating some of the natural behavior of traditional mirrors without requiring manual adjustment.
Driver Vision
Driver vision is another important part of Euro NCAP’s assessment of truck safety.
Because truck drivers sit significantly higher than many other road users, the geometry of the cab can create substantial areas of restricted visibility around the vehicle. Euro NCAP therefore assesses how much of the surrounding environment is directly visible from the driver’s position.
Direct vision is measured volumetrically, either virtually or using a specialist optical device positioned at the driver’s eyepoint. A larger visible volume contributes to a higher score.
Indirect vision can be improved by replacing conventional Class II and IV rear-view mirrors and Class V and VI close-proximity mirrors with camera-based systems. These systems can provide drivers with a wider and potentially more useful view of the vehicle’s surroundings.
Camera Monitoring Systems can also enable the displayed image itself to adapt to the driver. As mentioned above, with technologies such as Neonode’s Digital Mirror Augmentation, the displayed view can respond to changes in the driver’s head position, recreating the intuitive change in perspective experienced when looking into a traditional mirror while retaining the advantages of a camera-based system.
Manufacturers that replace conventional mirrors entirely with compliant Camera Monitoring Systems can achieve the highest scores for indirect vision.
Seatbelts and Occupant Protection
The 2028 protocols also mark an important shift in how Euro NCAP approaches occupant protection in trucks.
Until now, the Safer Trucks program has concentrated primarily on preventing crashes. From 2028, restraint systems will begin to form part of the rating, bringing technologies such as seatbelt pre-tensioners and routing detection into the assessment.
The focus will also move beyond simply determining whether a seatbelt is buckled. Systems will increasingly need to understand whether the belt is being worn correctly.
This distinction matters. A driver may technically have the seatbelt fastened while sitting on the belt, positioning it incorrectly or using only part of the restraint. Occupant monitoring capable of understanding seatbelt routing can identify these situations and provide a more accurate picture of whether the driver is properly protected.
Adaptive Airbag Systems
Occupant understanding can also improve the effectiveness of airbag systems.
Vehicles that can optimize airbag deployment according to an occupant’s size and position will be able to achieve higher scores. This represents a broader shift towards safety systems that respond not simply to the presence of an occupant, but to their actual position and circumstances at the moment protection is required.
For in-cabin sensing, this creates an important connection between active and passive safety. The same ability to understand where a person is, what they are doing and how they are positioned can inform systems designed both to prevent a crash and to reduce its consequences.
Towards a More Complete Understanding of the Driver
Euro NCAP has historically played an important role in pushing vehicle safety beyond minimum regulatory requirements and giving buyers a transparent way to compare performance. In the commercial vehicle sector, that market is still relatively young, but manufacturers are already responding.
“It is positive to see commercial vehicle manufacturers responding to Euro NCAP testing and showing impressive commitment to improving the safety of their new trucks,” says Matthew Avery, Director of Strategic Development at Euro NCAP.
The 2028 protocols will test whether that progress can continue. They also point towards a broader evolution in truck safety: from individual safety functions to systems that understand the driver, the vehicle and the situation together.
For manufacturers, this means technologies such as driver monitoring, occupant sensing, seatbelt routing and adaptive interfaces can no longer be considered entirely separate functions. Increasingly, they contribute to a common objective: understanding what is happening inside the cab well enough for the vehicle to respond appropriately.
For fleet operators and buyers, the implications are equally significant. Five-star performance under today’s protocols will not necessarily translate into five-star performance under future assessments. Vehicles incorporating the latest monitoring, vision and occupant-protection technologies will be better positioned to meet the higher standards expected from 2028, while providing greater protection for professional drivers and other road users.
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