The safety of a vehicle can have a large impact on the survivability of vehicle occupants as well as those that the vehicle may hit in the event of a crash. 

While New Car Assessment Programmes (NCAPs) provide safety ratings for new vehicles, safety ratings are also available for used vehicles in some regions of the world. These used car ratings are calculated based on the crash performance of a vehicle using police crash records. In the How Safe is Your Car initiative, vehicles received a rating for their crashworthiness and aggressivity. Crashworthiness was based on how well protected the driver was, while the aggressivity ratings were based on how badly hurt other road users were by the vehicle.

The Used Car Safety Ratings in Australasia, based on real world crash statistics, provide an indication of the relative risk of death or serious injury to the driver in a crash as compared to other vehicles on the road and gives a safety rating from 1-5 stars and also looks at how well vehicles are at protecting other road users. A driver of the worst vehicle rated is over eight times more likely to be killed or seriously injured in the same crash than the same driver in the safest vehicle.