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How much safety is enough?
It’s a question I’ve found myself asking with increasing frequency in recent years as the sheer volume of safety equipment in cars grows but with mixed results.
Accidents on the road are still frequent, tragically people are losing their lives, while at the same time the cost of new vehicles are going up as car makers add more safety technology to meet the demands of organisations like ANCAP (Australiasian New Car Assesment Program).
As every Australian is squeezed by the cost-of-living pressures, the price of new cars only gets steeper. The days of even sub-$20k cars is near an end as even the humble MG3 has jumped up by more than $5000 with the addition of autonomous emergency braking (AEB) and a new hybrid powertrain.
Modern cars come with a raft of active safety technology including, but not limited to, AEB, lane keeping assist, lane departure warning, emergency lane keeping, rear cross-traffic alert, blind spot detection, driver attention monitor and speed sign assistance. All this technology costs money and that expense is passed on to buyers.
I would never advocate against safety, I do feel we have reached a tipping point on the true value of safety in modern cars and the return that we get for the money we spend. Every car maker publically wants to achieve a five-star score from ANCAP, because not only is that the maximum result, but anything less is criticised harshly and seen as a failure.
ANCAP issues ratings for zero, one, two, three and four stars, and yet the real-world implications of the score are a simple ‘pass/fail.’ Like a stern parent that yells at their child if they get anything less than an ‘A’ on their school test, ANCAP does not accept anything less than the best.
ANCAP has repeatedly denied it takes a ‘pass/fail’ view but its history of publicly shaming companies with anything less than five stars and its insistence that every single new car offered in Australia meet that standard says otherwise.
This stance is in stark contrast to its European counterpart EuroNCAP, which uses its five star system to grade cars on a variety of levels. ANCAP’s public definition of a four-star score is labelled: “Provides an adequate level of safety performance yet fell short in one or more key assessment areas. May present a higher injury risk to occupants and/or other road users in certain scenarios or have a reduced ability to avoid a crash.”
EuroNCAP, on the other hand, is more positive and briefer in its explanation of the same results: “Overall good performance in crash protection and all round; additional crash avoidance technology may be present.”
How can two very similar groups, which use the same crash testing methodology (with ANCAP actually taking many of its published results from EuroNCAP crash tests), define the same results so differently?
What concerns me is the level of safety required to achieve five-stars is now so significant it both impacts the price of the car and the role of the driver. To get the top safety marks all vehicles must have forward safety systems that can scan the road 180 degrees in front of the car, to check for any obstacles. No, that’s not a typo, I said in front of the car, as in the view you have as the driver.
Why do we need that on every car? I have no idea how much such technology costs, but it will add to the retail price of the vehicle and that will almost certainly mean that previously affordable cars will be out of reach of many consumers. And what’s the inevitable results of that? People will continue to drive older cars that not only don’t have all these modern safety additions but also have older crash structures.
Which raises the questions - what price do you put on safety? How much more are you willing to spend to have ANCAP’s five-star tick of approval? And do you want all the safety tech or is the actual crash structure, the occupant protection, the most important element for you when you look to buy?
Obviously everyone will have their own unique answer, but there is evidence to suggest that safety only plays a partial role in how people choose their new car. ANCAP famously (infamously?) crash tested the Ford Mustang in 2017, awarding it a two-star rating and publically lambasted the company for the poor performance. As a result of this public shaming sales of the Mustang… continued unaffected, remaining the most popular sports car in the country. Make of that what you will…
It’s important for me to say at this point that it cannot be underestimated the impact ANCAP has had on improving safety on this country’s roads over the last two decades.
Car makers will always prioritise profit over adding extra equipment out of their kindness and generosity, so having an independent third-party to push them along has no doubt been beneficial to new car buyers.
But ANCAP is bankrolled by you and me - taxpayers - and it feels like time we start questioning the return on our investment. If the road toll isn’t shrinking dramatically with this rapid advance in safety technology and we continually take responsibility from the driver and place it in the computer, is that merely creating a generation of inattentive, computer-dependent drivers?
Would the government funding be better spent on driver training? If we need sensors to literally scan the road ahead of us to tell us it’s safe to drive, then I’d suggest we shouldn’t be letting people relying on such technology behind the wheel.
Safety is important and I do not want unsafe, cheap cars flooding our roads - but those two concepts are not tied together. We can manage both sides, and it would start with ANCAP taking a more EuroNCAP approach to anything less than a five-star score.
Endorsing a four-star car as “overall good performance” even if it doesn’t have sensors scanning the road ahead of you, or lane departure warning, forcing you, as the driver of the vehicle, to actually pay attention to what’s going on, doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me.
My concern is that under the current ‘five-stars-or-nothing’ approach is that new cars will simply become too expensive for a large number of people.
ANCAP updates its testing protocols every three years, increasing the amount of safety equipment required to achieve five stars each time it does so. This will force many people to stay in older vehicles, thus increasing the age of the national fleet, which will only increase the risk of accidents as the cars age. This seems like a self-defeating position for a safety body like ANCAP to take.
That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong. I’d love to know what you all think, so please comment below and join the conversation on social media - what price do you put on safety? Is a five-star ANCAP score a must for your next purchase? Do you want every new safety technology on your car or will the basics do?
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