Big utes in the firing line: 2025 Toyota Tundra, Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado and Ram 1500 get the attention of Australian safety organisations

The rising popularity of jumbo pick-up trucks has caught the attention of the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP).

The safety organisation, which is responsible for crash tests and divvying out safety ratings in Australia, said it has concerns about the extra large utes.

“We’ve definitely got concerns. There are a lot of community concerns we are fielding,” said ANCAP boss Carla Hoorweg.

“We’re looking at vehicles that are being designed for the US market, they’re not necessarily going to have a focus on pedestrian protection or vulnerable road user protection, that’s not a focus in those regulations. So we know there’s going to be a gap there.”

Pedestrian safety tests have been conducted by Euro NCAP since 1997, with pedestrian auto emergency braking and threshold of protection both mandatory to receive a maximum five-star rating in current Euro NCAP and ANCAP protocols.

The US doesn’t have any specific requirements around pedestrian impact protection like Australia and these vehicles don’t have many Australian Design Rules (ADRs) that apply to them, said Hoorweg.

This means there isn’t a lot of scope for government regulations to be applied to these vehicles, even with the new ADRs coming around pedestrian autonomous emergency braking.

Hoorweg said ANCAP was exploring options on how to test these vehicles in certain situations.

RAM 1500

“We are considering what our options are around physical testing, so there’s potential for pedestrian impact testing,” she said.

This test involves firing adult and child head forms and leg forms at the bonnet, windscreen, front bumper of a vehicle to determine how well it can physically protect pedestrians from serious head, pelvis and leg injury.

ANCAP’s new focus comes as its US equivalent, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), plans to crackdown on large pick-ups, SUVs and vans after pedestrian fatalities rose by 57 per cent between 2013 and 2022.

For now, full crash tests of big utes are off the table for ANCAP due to the exorbitant costs of buying five vehicles of each model needed to conduct the different crash tests.

Hoorweg said crash tests might not give the best data anyway, as the vehicles’ size, weight and ride height mean they are likely to perform better in crash tests compared to smaller and lighter vehicles.

Chevrolet Silverado (Image: Mark Oastler)

ANCAP also said it would be looking at how the jumbo trucks' active driver aids performed.

“We know some of the vehicles have them, but we don’t know whether they’re going to perform to the same standard as we’ve seen in passenger cars and we don’t know necessarily whether they're going to have the breadth of performance,” said Hoorweg.

“So what I mean by that is autonomous emergency braking. Can they detect a car? Can they detect a pedestrian? Can they detect a cyclist? Can they detect a motorcyclist and respond to those different other road users, and that’s a concern.”

The safety organisation wants to do a research piece that assesses the performance of these vehicles across the same elements of active safety as standard passenger cars.

It will then be able to give a grade to each vehicle in relation to its active driver aids in a similar vein to what it does with some vans.

Toyota Tundra (Image: Stephen Ottley)

Big pick-up trucks are growing in popularity but still remain relatively niche vehicles, accounting for less than one per cent of vehicles sold through the first eight months of this year.

So far Aussies have bought 6833 large pickup trucks through August, a drop of 3.9 per cent compared to the same period in 2023.

The RAM 1500 is the most popular, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado and Ford F-150.

Toyota has been running a trial program of its full-size Tundra pick-up in Australia, which consisted of 300 examples leased to customers nationwide. This program is expected to lead to full public sales shortly.