Honda Just Became The First Automaker To Earn A Five-Star FIA Safety Rating

FIA’s Road Safety Index rates Honda’s global safety governance and strategy across 17 countries, not individual crash-test scores for specific cars or trucks.

By: Brian Potter

Sep 11, at 4:11am ET

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Honda is the first automaker to earn a five-star rating in the FIA Road Safety Index products and services category.
The FIA Road Safety Index is a governance audit assessing companies' safety planning, monitoring, and reporting.
Earning five stars required clearing three new FIA modules added to the original framework.

Honda's road safety record just earned a grade no other automaker has posted. The FIA awarded the Japanese manufacturer a 5-star rating in its Road Safety Index products and services category, the top score on a scale the organization just widened from three stars to five.

The recognition arrived at Monza during Italian Grand Prix week in September, timed to one of racing's biggest stages. For Honda owners and shoppers, it's a signal about how the company runs its safety programs worldwide, not a new crash-test result for any specific model.

Honda Earns FIA's Top Road Safety Score

The FIA Road Safety Index exists to let companies and organizations assess, manage and report their road safety footprint, according to Honda. It's a governance audit, closer to an ESG scorecard than the kind of crash testing behind ratings from NHTSA or the IIHS.

Reaching 5 stars required clearing three new modules the FIA added on top of the original three-star framework. They include Planning, Monitoring of Safety Performance, and Safety Culture Management paired with Supply Chain or Products/Services Coverage. Honda cleared all of them as the first company to do so.

Honda FIA Road Safety Index recognition event 2026

Photo by: Honda

The FIA credited Honda's "ambitious targets, strong governance" and its methods for measuring safety impact across its global lineup. Auditors also pointed to clear plans for tracking progress going forward, not just a snapshot of current performance.

Scale mattered too. Honda's assessment covered 17 countries and more than 90 percent of its worldwide motorcycle and automobile sales, spanning both product lines rather than a single flagship market or vehicle segment.

Why It Actually Matters For Drivers

A 5-star governance score doesn't replace the window sticker. Honda's crash-test performance, including the fallout from incidents like Honda's airbag sensor recall affecting 100,000 cars, still gets judged model by model by federal regulators.

What the rating does capture is whether a company builds safety into how it plans, monitors and reports, the kind of systemic work that eventually shapes features like the tech Honda has borrowed from IndyCar racing.

What do you think?

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Fleet operators have their own reasons to pay attention. A manufacturer with documented safety governance across 17 countries offers a paper trail that procurement teams increasingly want, especially as commercial buyers weigh crash test results for large trucks against corporate safety commitments.

Motor1's Take: The FIA audit gives fleets and buyers independent proof that a maker manages safety across markets. Shoppers should still check model crash-test ratings and recall histories when buying. Watch whether the governance score leads to visible safety upgrades and quicker recall responses. If that happens, drivers win. If not, the score was paperwork.