In 2007, a Chinese sedan called the Brilliance BS6 went through a Euro NCAP crash test and came out the other side with zero stars, a result that stuck to the country’s automotive reputation for a generation. The footage, all crumpled A-pillar and collapsed footwell, still gets dredged up whenever a Chinese brand announces a new export market, a shorthand for a stereotype that, for a while, was earned.
In October 2025, a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra caught fire after a high speed crash in Chengdu, and rescuers could not pry the doors open before the driver died inside. That story circulated just as widely, for very different reasons.
While both incidents happened, neither tells the whole truth on its own. The honest answer to “are Chinese cars safe?” requires holding two facts at once: the best Chinese built EVs now post some of the strongest scores in the world’s toughest crash tests, and some very current, very real safety gaps exist that crash test stars were never designed to catch. Sorting out which is which starts with the test data itself.
The Euro NCAP Numbers Are Real
Euro NCAP is the toughest, most transparent crash regime that Chinese exports face, and it does not grade on a curve. Every car sits through the same four category assessment, adult occupant protection, child occupant protection, vulnerable road user protection, and safety assist, and the bar for five stars has gotten harder almost every year rather than easier.
Against that moving target, Chinese brands have landed five stars with startling consistency. The BYD Atto 3, sold at home as the Yuan Plus, scored 91 percent for adult occupant protection and 89 percent for child occupant protection when Euro NCAP tested it in 2023. That same year, the BYD Seal, BYD Dolphin, and XPeng P7 all earned five stars in what Euro NCAP called its most demanding round of testing yet, a batch of results that also debuted a flood safety check testing whether doors unlock automatically once a car is fully submerged, a scenario the BYDs and the XPeng both picked up points for.
Nio’s ET5 and ET7 both carry five stars, and the newer Nio Firefly, tested under Euro NCAP’s tougher 2025 protocol, logged a 96 percent adult occupant score, among the best results the program has ever recorded. Even value oriented entries are landing five stars against the same protocol that grades a Mercedes or a BMW: the MG4 scored 83 percent for adult occupant safety and 80 percent for child occupant safety back in 2022, while newcomers Leapmotor B10 and Hongqi EHS7 both posted 93 percent adult occupant scores in Euro NCAP’s most recent 2025 report.
For a sense of how far this has moved, consider Polestar, majority owned by Geely and built on shared underpinnings with Volvo. The Polestar 3 posted a 93 percent child occupant score in testing completed in April 2025, the highest Euro NCAP had recorded for any passenger car in nearly a decade. That is the caliber of company Chinese owned engineering now keeps.
Two caveats belong in any fair accounting. First, Euro NCAP tests the European specification version of each car, and manufacturers have confirmed their export models often carry structural and safety upgrades that are not standard on the domestic Chinese version of the same nameplate. A five star Atto 3 sold in Rotterdam is not automatically identical to a Yuan Plus sold in Zhengzhou. Second, a five star rating measures how a car behaves across a defined set of crash geometries. It does not measure every real world failure mode, a distinction that matters a great deal later in this story.
Grading the Home Turf
Domestically, Chinese cars answer to C-NCAP, which the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, or CATARC, has run since 2006, modeled loosely on Euro NCAP’s own methodology. For years the program had a credibility problem. A widely cited 2014 round of testing saw six of eight cars earn five stars and the other two settle for four, at a time when electronic stability control, a baseline requirement in European testing, was not even factored into the Chinese score. Critics inside and outside China took to calling it a rubber stamp.
That criticism pushed reform. The 2024 revision of C-NCAP folded active safety into the rating for the first time, adding scored tests for automatic emergency braking, driver monitoring, and road feature recognition, alongside tougher impact speeds. CATARC has already flagged the next revision, due in 2027, as tougher still.
The center expects scores to fall by roughly 8 percent across currently rated vehicles under the new protocol, with some models likely losing a full star, and the update will introduce China’s first crash test dummy built from domestic body measurement data rather than an imported design. It is not a finished product, but it is a program visibly tightening rather than standing still.
In the United States, tariffs have kept most mainland Chinese brands off dealer lots entirely, so there is little IIHS or NHTSA data to point to. Even Polestar, despite assembling the Polestar 3 in South Carolina, had limited formal American test results as of early 2026, less a red flag than a reflection of how test bodies prioritize high volume nameplates first.
Where the Stars Don’t Reach
No crash test rating would have saved the driver of that Xiaomi SU7 Ultra in Chengdu. According to a forensic report obtained by the Chinese outlet Caixin, the car was traveling at roughly 203 kph, about 126 mph, when it collided with another vehicle and crashed into a central divider in the early hours of October 13, 2025.
That kind of speed points to driver error well before it points to any engineering flaw. What happened next is the part worth scrutinizing: investigators concluded the impact and fire knocked out the low voltage system powering the SU7’s electric door releases, and with no mechanical latch accessible from the outside, the doors could not be opened. Rescuers pulling on the exterior handles reportedly stumbled backward as the doors stayed sealed, and the car went through three separate combustion events within five minutes.
It was the third Xiaomi fire incident of 2025 and the second tied to doors that failed to open after impact, following a March crash on an elevated highway near Tongling that killed three young women while the car’s NOA, or Navigate on Autopilot, feature was engaged. Xiaomi said the system detected a construction barrier, issued an alert, and began slowing from 116 kph before the vehicle struck the barrier at 97 kph, suggesting a partial save that still was not enough.
Neither crash was a crash test failure in the traditional sense. They were failures of design philosophy: door mechanisms built around consumer electronics aesthetics rather than power loss redundancy, and a driver assistance feature whose marketing, and arguably whose driver, trusted it further than its actual capability warranted. Crash protocols, Chinese or European, were never built to catch either of those things, because they measure structural crashworthiness in a controlled impact, not post crash escape or software behavior on an open road.
Regulators noticed fast. Two weeks after the March crash, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology summoned nearly 60 delegates representing the country’s major automakers and laid out new rules. Marketing terms like “autonomous” or “self driving” were prohibited in favor of plain SAE level disclosure, driver monitoring now has to intervene if hands leave the wheel for more than 60 seconds, and public beta testing on open roads was banned outright.
Over the air updates now face tighter validation requirements before reaching customer vehicles. By September, MIIT had drafted a mandatory national standard requiring every vehicle door to carry both an internal and an external mechanical release, with enough space reserved for a hand to operate it even with the power dead.
That standard was formally approved at the end of January 2026, and China will effectively phase hidden, power dependent door handles out of new vehicles from 2027. Xiaomi has already dropped the design on its newer YU7 SUV and the next generation SU7, and has stood up an internal safety committee with veto power over design decisions, though public pressure for a formal recall of the roughly 370,000 first generation SU7s already on the road continues.
The Battery Question, Answered With Numbers
Fire is the other anxiety that trails every NEV conversation, and here the data cuts against the popular assumption. Chinese fire authority figures show the new energy vehicle fire rate falling from 1.85 per 10,000 vehicles in 2021 to 0.96 per 10,000 by 2023, versus a gasoline car rate holding around 1.5 per 10,000 over the same stretch, meaning China’s own NEV fleet had already turned statistically safer against fire than its combustion counterparts.
Other markets tell a similar story. Sweden’s civil protection agency logged EVs and hybrids catching fire at 3.8 per 100,000 vehicles, against 68 per 100,000 for combustion cars, and American NHTSA figures put the gap at roughly 7.2 million miles between EV fires versus just 18,000 miles between gasoline car fires, a rate roughly 400 times higher for gas cars per mile driven.
Battery chemistry is doing real work here. BYD’s Blade Battery, built from lithium iron phosphate cells arranged directly into the pack structure rather than grouped into modules, is the most visible example. In the company’s own nail penetration demonstrations, a standard abuse test that drives a steel spike through a charged cell to force an internal short, Blade cells stay stable and do not ignite, while a comparable nickel manganese cobalt cell ignites within seconds, with the Blade’s surface temperature topping out between 30 and 60 degrees Celsius.
That is a company run test, worth the grain of salt reserved for manufacturer demonstrations, but the underlying stability advantage of LFP chemistry over nickel rich cells is well established independently of BYD’s marketing.
Beijing is not leaving safety to chemistry alone. GB 38031-2025, a newly mandatory national standard, took effect on July 1, 2026, and it raises the bar sharply. Where the old rule only required a battery to delay fire or explosion for five minutes after thermal runaway begins, giving occupants time to escape, the new standard requires no fire and no explosion at all, under an expanded battery of abuse tests that now includes a bottom impact test aimed at the road debris strikes that low riding EV packs are especially exposed to. CATL had already certified its Qilin battery against the new rule by April 2025, and every automaker selling new models in China now has to clear the same bar.
So, Are They Safe?
The honest verdict depends on which car and which failure mode is under discussion. On the metric crash tests were built to measure, structural survivability in a defined impact, the leading Chinese EVs sold in Europe are now competing with, and in some categories beating, the German and Japanese benchmarks they used to trail by a generation. That is what the Euro NCAP scoreboard says in black and white.
On the metrics crash tests were never built to measure, whether a door will open after the power dies, whether a driver assistance feature is marketed honestly enough that its user understands its limits, the record over the past eighteen months has been genuinely rough, and Xiaomi in particular has paid for it in lives, market value, and regulatory scrutiny.
What is worth tracking rather than dismissing is how fast the fixes have followed the failures. Door handle mandates, marketing crackdowns, and a battery standard that flips “delay the fire” into “prevent the fire” have all landed within about eighteen months of the incidents that exposed the gaps. For a global buyer sizing up a Chinese EV, the crash test star rating is a genuinely useful, genuinely earned data point. It is just not the only question worth asking anymore, and increasingly, Chinese regulators seem to agree.
SOURCES: Euro C-NCAP, MIIT
Hillary started his automotive writing journey at HotCars, and has written for CarNewsChina, GlobalSUV, and many other top auto blogs.
He loves to read, play chess, and supports Liverpool during the weekends