This article describes the current possibilities for assessing vehicle and road safety, their advantages and disadvantages and for which issues they are used in the development of a new vehicle generation. However, the existing assessment criteria almost exclusively evaluate the effects on vehicle safety by means of an assistance system, which is sometimes not sufficient. For this reason, further criteria, such as user acceptance of a driver assistance system and its effects regarding the achievable safety gain, are mentioned. On this basis, a discussion on possible adjustments in the 3 columns for assessing the effectiveness and how the associated test specifications could change takes place.