Cupra's Raval gets four Euro NCAP stars until you tick one option
Safety became an options box on a €25,950 city car
Euro NCAP published four new results on 2 September, and the only car in the group that did not manage five stars on the equipment every buyer gets is the European one. The Cupra Raval scored four stars as standard and five with an optional Safety Pack. Three Chinese newcomers almost nobody in Europe had heard of five years ago took the full rating outright.
AION UT, Geely E2 and Leapmotor B05 all took five stars
The AION UT scored 66% for Safe Driving, 74% for Crash Avoidance, 91% for Crash Protection and 88% for Post-Crash Safety. The Leapmotor B05 managed 66, 77, 92 and 89. The Geely E2, which was China's best-selling car last year, posted the strongest assistance result of the batch at 79% for Safe Driving. None of the three needed an options box to get there. Euro NCAP was not uncritical of them either: it flagged the AION UT for leaning too heavily on its centre screen for key driving controls, and called the Geely E2's autonomous emergency braking inconsistent. Both cleared five stars anyway. Chinese brands took seven per cent of EU new car sales last year and close to ten per cent in the UK, and the number of Chinese cars Euro NCAP has assessed has risen nearly tenfold since 2021.
The Safety Pack lifts Safe Driving from 58% to 72%
The pack contains two systems: predictive adaptive cruise control and front cross traffic alert. With them fitted, the Raval's Safe Driving score climbs from 58% to 72% and Crash Avoidance from 66% to 77%, largely because the front traffic alert sharpens the emergency braking response at junctions and in corners. Every other number on the scorecard is identical. That is the entire gap between four stars and five. Euro NCAP's on-road assessment ran some 2,000 km through Italy, France and Spain, where the electric supermini read the speed limit correctly in 80% of cases, covering 92% of the distance driven.
The Raval's 95% Post-Crash score is the best of the four
The structure was never the problem. The Raval took full points in the side barrier test and in the full-width frontal test, its centre airbag protected both occupants in the side pole impact, and its 95% Post-Crash Safety score is the highest in this release. It does drop points for stiff windscreen pillars, for marginal chest protection in the side pole test, and for having no child presence detection, a system the Geely E2 fits as standard and collects extra marks for. On the physical side this is a strong small car. The missing star sits entirely in the assistance column, which is a specification decision rather than an engineering one.
Cupra leads with five stars, and Germany prices the gap at €3,900
Cupra published its own announcement from Martorell the same day, headlined on the five-star rating. The four-star standard result does not appear anywhere in it. What the release does add is genuinely useful: the Safety Pack is a country setting in most European markets, and the Plus, Endurance and VZ versions are five-star as standard. In Germany that puts the entry Raval at €25,950 and the cheapest five-star Raval, the Plus, at €29,850. Cupra has not published a standalone price for the pack itself.
Euro NCAP's dual-rating rules give safety packs an expiry date
Programme director Aled Williams called the arrangement a compromise, arguing that an optional pack keeps the car affordable while making the technology available to buyers who want it. Euro NCAP's own eligibility rules are stricter than that framing suggests: a manufacturer qualifies for a dual rating only if the pack is sold as a standalone option, if it meets minimum fitment rates across the market, and if the features inside it move into standard equipment over time. That is a different logic from the assistance systems Brussels made mandatory, which arrive on every car at once. The Kia K4 landed in the same place in this release, four stars standard and five with its pack.
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The Raval is the first of Volkswagen Group's MEB+ small cars to meet the 2026 protocol, which makes 58% the number to watch. Euro NCAP lists the Volkswagen ID.Polo among the AION UT's rivals, and the ID.Polo is the Raval's own platform sibling, built in Pamplona on the same architecture. Unless predictive adaptive cruise control becomes standard equipment, the ID.Polo, the ID.Cross and the Skoda Epiq will walk into the same test with the same base specification and collect the same four stars.
There is a clock on this. Euro NCAP's dual-rating rules require pack features to migrate into standard equipment, so the arrangement that saved the Raval's fifth star is built to stop working. The test is simple and checkable: whether the €25,950 entry Raval carries predictive adaptive cruise control as standard by its first update. Until it does, a European brand is charging for a star that three Chinese newcomers handed over for nothing.
