SAFETY FIRSTS

Top Five Safest (New) Cars on the Market

Ever wondered what the safest new car on the market is? We have. That’s why we took a browse through Euro NCAP’s published results for cars crash-tested in 2017. Why there, you might ask. Well, who knows safety better than the guys who wear crispy white lab coats and crash cars (in the name of safety) for a living?

These days, five-star crash test ratings are a dime-a-dozen. So, how to find the safest new car on the market then? Well, we set a stringent list of requirements of course.

Firstly, each car must be available in South Africa, be it at the moment of writing this article, or in the near future. Secondly, each car should have been tested by the European New Car Assessment Programme during 2017 and should not have been fitted with optional safety enhancement packs.

While Euro NCAP rewards the various cars within their respective segments, the test standards remain the same. All vehicles are judged on how well they perform across four categories.

- Adult Occupant Protection: How well a

car can protect its adult occupants.

- Child Occupant Protection: How well protected children are while strapped into a child seat.

- Pedestrian Protection: How well a car protects ‘Vulnerable Road Users’ with whom it might collide. Potential risk of injuries is also considered. - Safety Assists: On-board safety-related systems are judged in this category, and includes everything from seat belt reminders to lane-keep assist.

Since the treasured five-star rating is nothing new, we decided to select only the best vehicles from the five-star club. Next, we did not merely judge cars on the individual Euro NCAP categories as listed above. Instead, we worked out the average overall safety results in the applicable categories.