Cars which receive a five-star crash safety rating mightn’t actually be all that safe in real life, according to a new investigation by Channel 4.
Dispatches found that tests conducted by the likes of the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) to measure car safety don’t always reflect how protected occupants will be in the real world.
Euro NCAP, which is funded by government bodies, puts all new cars through a series of in-depth crash tests, before awarding vehicles a rating out of five based on how safe the car is judged to be.
Drivers not always protected as expected
However, Channel 4 found that some of the cars which Euro NCAP had awarded a five-star rating to didn’t always protect drivers as expected.
Folksam, an insurance analyst company in Sweden, had awarded only three stars to a number of vehicles given five by Euro NCAP, based on its own tests.
A Folksam spokesman said that the laboratory conditions that cars are tested under are more accurate for high-speed crashes, but don’t reflect the full scope of incidents that happen in the real world.
Small overlap test
Likewise, the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), found that thousands of drivers were still being killed in cars that had been awarded with high crash safety ratings.
The IIHS discovered that some of the cars had only been tested for certain crash scenarios and not for others, particularly the ‘small overlap test’ where just a small part of the car’s front is impacted.
Designed to replicate what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with either another vehicle or a stationary object like a tree or electric pole, the test is reportedly a challenge for some current seatbelt and airbag designs.
Outdated information given to customers
Nearly three quarters of the cars subjected to the IIHS’ small overlap test crumbled in a way that could have killed the driver according to the authority’s data.
Becky Mueller, an IIHS senior research engineer, said: “Unfortunately in Europe they do not conduct a small overlap test yet – so improvements that are being made to vehicles in the US, we’re not certain that those same improvements are being made to European models.”
Dispatches also visited several car dealerships in secret, and found that six out of eight were using outdated information regarding the ratings of cars when selling them to customers.
