Your first link doesn't prove nothing, it has nothing to do with airbags being mandatory. According to this: https://autoily.com/when-did-airbags-become-mandatory/ , they are only mandatory in the US (my fault, sorry). Some countries, like India, are requiring ONE front airbag since 2019. The core of my message stands: car makers go way ahead the mandates. I don't recall any safety technology that ever banned or delayed a car model from the market, unlike for example emission regulations, that are announced with a deadline in a "by 2030 no car can emit more than X CO2 g/km, so you better comply or be banned" fashion. In Europe that kind of regulation is causing diesel cars to vanish from the market. Safety regulations are always after the fact: "it seems than 100% of the new cars already have seat belts. Lets make it mandatory", and are usually announced with "the UE would like all cars to have anti-collision alert mechanisms before 2025", signaling that maybe in 2030 they make it mandatory for the remaining 20% that still don't have it today.
About the NCAP, I don't understand your message. Maybe you understood that brands send their cars to NCAP voluntarely? What I meant was that NCAP is a voluntary non-profit organization, and they can't do much even if your car is a cofin with wheels other than giving it zero stars. It's not like they can ban your car from the market under safety motives, like a government could do if they want.
What happens with these non-mandatory programmes is that a manufacturer can give the programme money to buy their standard equipment vehicle and then the programme will buy the appropriate car from a dealer. The vast majority of vehicles are purchased this way.
This way they can't manipulate the vehicles being tested. The easiest way for your new 4954 model to get excellent NCAP scores is to make the actual 4954's people can buy from a dealer all good enough for excellent NCAP scores, the NCAP will just buy one and test it and it should score well because it's a 4954.
If only there was some way to move cars from one place to another :D
A fellow passenger on a train one day was in that line of work. Customer dispatches him to pick up a car, he gets a train to the nearest station, gets a taxi to the car, picks the car up, drives it to the desired destination, another taxi and another train ride. Pay is reasonable if you like driving and can fill your time on a train (e.g. you like to read or listen to stuff, not great if you're an outdoors person or you need to be at home looking after the kids). Obviously most customers are moving valuable cars they can't get to, classics, high end luxury or sports cars where there might only be two dealers in the country, that sort of thing, but he doesn't care if you want him to drive a mid-market hatchback bought new off the lot yesterday afternoon, pay is the same.
and Euro NCAP chooses the cars indepently: https://www.euroncap.com/en/about-euro-ncap/the-car-selectio...
Or is it possible that you mix up the US regulation on a thread about EURO NCAP?