The Australasian New Car Assessment Program, better known by its acronym ANCAP, recently released a three-star safety rating for Hyundai i30 Sedan. While that’s a disappointing result for Hyundai, it’s arguably a more troubling result for the Australian car-buying public – and not in the way you think.
First things first – safety is critical for every car and we believe strongly that every vehicle sold in Australia should be as safe as is reasonably possible. The key word in that sentence is ‘reasonably’ because reason, logic and consumer needs are seemingly getting lost amid ANCAP’s galaxy of stars.
The problem is actually quite simple, ANCAP’s sole focus is to ensure car companies make their vehicles as safe as possible. Car companies, on the other hand, need to make their cars both safe and commercially appealing. In the case of the i30 Sedan, Hyundai Australia would have likely had to invest millions of dollars in having its headquarters develop safety specifically for the car in order to achieve five-stars and take a guess who will absorb that cost? That would be you, the consumer.
At a time when cars are getting increasingly expensive and other cost-of-living pressures are making it harder for people to afford a new, safer, car, Hyundai adding $5k or more to the price of the i30 Sedan in order to meet five-stars only makes it a tougher sell and brings us back to that question of what is reasonable? Drilling down into the details of the i30 Sedan, it lost marks for elements like ‘far-side impact’ (which would require a centre airbag to be developed) and rear whiplash protection and not having technology like driver monitoring.
Hyundai certainly could do more to make the car safer, but the reality is this is fundamentally still a safe car and should not be avoided because of ANCAP’s rating. Surely the point of a five star rating system is to have levels rather than a simple ‘pass/fail’ so it’s up to you, as the consumer, to decide if you’re willing to ‘take a chance’ on the i30 Sedan and its safety weak spots.
Although the more challenging part of the question is how does a five-star ANCAP score in 2024 compared to one from 2020 or earlier, because the safety authority regularly updates its testing protocols in order to keep up with technology changes. So, would the i30 Sedan have scored better than three-stars when it was first released in 2020 when ANCAP’s testing was different? Maybe it would have been three or it could have been five, I guess we’ll never know because ANCAP waited until the mid-life facelift to crash test it.
The decision to test the i30 Sedan now, four years after it first went on sale, raises some obvious questions. As does the decision to test a car that, according to the manufacturer, sells approximately 3000 units per annum. Carla Hoorweg, ANCAP Chief Executive Officer, called the i30 “a popular choice within the Small Car segment” but that includes the (already crash-rated i30 hatch). However, the i30 is the third best-seller behind the Toyota Corolla and Kia Cerato, where were tested in 2018 and 2021 respectively, which does dent ANCAP’s argument that it’s priority is to present consumers with “clear, reliable and independent consumer information” – in Hoorweg’s own words. What is clear about the differences in testing between the 2018 Corolla and 2024 i30 Sedan? I’ve searched the ANCAP website and there is no obvious details on how the testing protocols have changed in that six year span – and yet both cars are publicly rated to the same five star system. That’s not clear and reliable, that’s deeply confusing to me and I write about cars for a living, so how is the average new car buyer supposed to know?
Let’s take another example of how not all five-star scores are the same and look at the 2024 Toyota CH-R and the 2022 GWM Havel Jolion. Both get the same rating, drill down into the scores a bit and you’ll find under ‘Safety Assist’ the CH-R scores 82 per cent and the Jolion has a 92 per cent rating. On paper, therefore, the Haval looks the safer option, right? With better active safety assistance, right?
Wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, there’s a gulf between these two cars when it comes to active safety that I can personally attest to having driven them both. For starters, between 2022 and 2024 ANCAP added ‘Driver Monitoring’, expanded its autonomous emergency braking criteria and removed ‘Occupant Status’ – so the two cars are judged to a different standard. Then there’s the real-world difference between the two cars, particularly around driver monitoring, because the Jolion has one of the most poorly calibrated systems I’ve experienced and the CH-R has one of the best. The Haval’s system is so sensitive and intrusive it becomes a distraction and I’d argue borders on making the car less safe than it could be. And yet, if you just glance at the star ratings and the overall scores and don’t do your own detailed research, the Haval appears to be the safer choice according to ANCAP. Which further serves to underline the “clear” consumer advice line.
There’s also the question of popularity and relevance of the vehicles being crash tested. Like I say, the i30 Sedan makes up only a small percentage of total i30 sales, while a more popular model like the Toyota LandCruiser 70 Series is able to avoid ANCAP’s scrutiny because it was suddenly reclassified as a ‘light truck’ after more than three decades as a ute. Given the demand for the LandCruiser 70 Series amongst both private and fleet buyers, surely it should be tested in order to provide clear, reliable and independent consumer information. Don’t they deserve to know what they’re getting so they can make an informed decision, especially given the core design dates back to 1984?
This isn’t the first time ANCAP has raised some alarming questions in my mind. Back in 2022 ANCAP earned some headlines when it rated the Hyundai Palisade (are you picking up on a theme here?) four stars in June before giving the facelifted model a five-star rating in August. What happened in those two months? It’s a long story but to make it brief, Hyundai added some missing active safety technology and ANCAP was able to use the physical crash testing data from the first test and then apply it to the second score by simply factoring in the new safety elements.
But there were some broader issues with that test that deserve closer examination, namely ANCAP’s decision to test the Palisade and its reasons it gave for it. Specially, ANCAP said it was because the Palisade was “the only Top 10 selling model within the large SUV (<$70,000) segment without an independent safety rating”.
That’s a perfectly reasonable and logical argument on the surface, dive a little deeper though and some red flags are raised. Namely, of the other nine cars in that segment that were rated five star at the time of the Palisade’s crash testing, only three others were tested to the same post-2020 testing protocols as the Palisade. Meanwhile, the best-seller in the class, the Toyota Prado, had a five-star ANCAP rating that dated back to 2011, albeit with updates to the score in 2017 when new tech was added. Even so, that means six of the 10 large SUVs were tested to a lower standard than the Palisade but have a higher published score. I’ll ask again, does that sound like clear and reliable information to you?
A cynic might suggest ANCAP crash tested the Palisade in June to publicly embarrass Hyundai and then take credit for inspiring the August safety upgrades; luckily for ANCAP I’m not a cynic…
On the flipside of that argument is that Hyundai’s decision to add the extra safety (which would have happened years before either crash test) was driven by pressure from ANCAP’s constant push for safer cars – which is an obvious plus for consumers. Although, there’s also a chance Hyundai wanted to do what was right by its customers anyway, but I guess we’ll never know the whole truth.
There’s also the question of the cost of ANCAP doing business, especially when the results are so questionable, because these crash tests aren’t cheap, and as the organisation is partially taxpayer funded it’s important you and I know where and how our money is spent. The bill for ANCAP’s crash testing of any new model is believed to be somewhere around $750,000 to $1 million as it has to buy multiple examples of the car in order to undertake several specific impact tests.
The two Hyundai models mentioned in this story sell in less combined volume than the LandCruiser 70 Series, so does it make economic sense to crash test vehicles selling in relatively small volumes and miss the ones that are more popular based on a technical loophole?
It’s one of many questions I’ve posed in this story and they can all really only be answered by you, the tax-paying, new-car-buying public. It’s your money and your safety that’s on the line.
However, we still need to deal with the ‘big lie’ that we’ve all been led to believe – that anything less than ANCAP’s five stars isn’t safe, which is a gross oversimplification of a complex topic. ANCAP is critical of every single car that does not achieve five stars, and yet in 2024 that score means something very different to 2018, so it’s not a true like-for-like comparison. The reality is a three-star car against the 2024 protocols should be safer than a five-star model from more than five years ago, that’s the cost of progress.
And yet we’ve been led to believe that buying a three-star car like the Hyundai i30 Sedan is simply unacceptable and borders on ‘unsafe’, which is fundamentally not true.
This is just my opinion and while I’ve been critical of ANCAP I’m not ‘anti-ANCAP’ by any stretch. There is no doubt its constant raising of the safety bar has forced car makers to improve and the result is safer cars for everyone. However, I believe we should always be critical of our institutions and they should be open to fair and reasonable questioning, and in recent years I believe some serious concerns have become obvious and these need to be challenged.
Bottom line – when you go and purchase your next new car, don’t just look at the ANCAP star rating, drill down into the details and compare it against the other cars in the segment and see how they compare in terms of both a rating and timing.
Safety is too important to overlook or oversimplify.
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