AA SAFEST CAR: TESLA MODEL Y

Along with the Peoples Choice award, the Safest Car award is the other category where our judges from the AA and DRIVEN Car Guide have no input whatsoever.

While the Peoples Choice is literally that — our readers vote for their pick from the 10 best-selling vehicles — the Safest Car award is decided by the scores awarded by ANCAP for crash test and safety ratings.

ANCAP is the Australasian New Car Assessment Programme and is Australia and New Zealand’s independent voice on vehicle safety. ANCAP carries out crash tests on cars and performance assessments on safety features and technologies — or sources the data from its close alignment with the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) — then publishes a simple star rating to indicate relative safety performance, along with a numerical score.

Over the last 30 years, ANCAP has published independent safety ratings for thousands of new vehicle makes, models and variants, allowing consumers to compare the relative safety between vehicles of similar size.

As with last year, the top three scoring vehicles were all extremely close, but also like last year the Tesla Model Y came out on top with the highest score of 366 points, 5 points ahead of Lexus RX (91.5 per cent vs 90.25 per cent), thanks to its impressive suite of active and passive safety aids.

Features include dual frontal, side chest-protecting and side head-protecting (curtain) airbag, a centre airbag for added protection to front seat occupants in side impact crashes, autonomous emergency braking (Car-to-Car, Vulnerable Road User, Junction Assist and Backover), a lane support system with lane keep assist (LKA), lane departure warning (LDW) and emergency lane keeping (ELK), and an advanced speed assistance system (SAS).

Runners-up: Lexus NX, Lexus RX