Should the Mustang have won?
The Ford Mustang won our Top Coupe award this year. But should a car with a three-star safety rating win, asks Damien O’Carroll.
Now just let me say this first up – I love the new Ford Mustang in all of its forms – the bellowing V8 GT is a superbly good thing, with its pitch-perfect blend of traditional V8-powered American muscle car attitude and modern, high-tech improvements.
Similarly, while the the fourcylinder car lacks the belligerence of the V8, it is equally worthy of love for its more delicate and accurate handling, responsive steering and brilliantly adjustable attitude through corners.
It looks great, is well-built enough that you can’t really criticise it for ‘‘American’’ build quality (even though there are a few places here and there that let it down), is great value for money and is one of the most characterful and blatantly fun cars on the market today.
I genuinely do love it. Yet I was still the one arguing against it winning an award in our Top Cars this year.
Why? One little reason – its dismal 3 star NCAP crash rating.
My argument was simple – a car without a 5 star rating shouldn’t be be eligible for a win in a category that wasn’t something appearance-based like the Top Interior award or Sexiest Car.
But is it really that simple? Or actually even that important?
Some Car of the Year awards involve gathering all the finalists together at a race track and rigorously testing them back-toback both on the track and on the road, which is a fine way to do it.
But the reality is we here at Stuff simply don’t have the resources, time, personnel or money to do that, so we have a more simple formula – we each make a list of the cars we liked the most out of all the cars we tested in the past year, combine it with the other’s lists and argue about the ones that don’t match up.
OK, so it is a bit more involved and professional than that, but that is the general gist of things.
That means that a few categories got contentious. The overall winner, for example, was a mighty argument despite the fact that almost all of us ranked the eventual winner highly.
Other categories saw compromise come easier – not all of us had driven the Audi A8, but were willing to take the word of those who had that its interior was a cut above.
And that is the way it has to be done with just a few judges – if we had 20 or 30 people voting, then these things tend to sort themselves out naturally, but we only have four.
Our Top Car awards have a looser and lighter approach for this very reason. And if they were more rigorous and traditional, my argument against the Mustang would no doubt have held more water.
But as it stands, we are really only telling you what cars that were released into the New Zealand market in 2018 we liked the most, nothing more than that. And the Mustang certainly meets that standard – we all liked it very much indeed.
However, there is another reason that the 3 star rating perhaps shouldn’t matter so much in our awards – at the end of the day it is the buyer’s decision as to whether the safety rating is a big factor for them or not.
We certainly have an obligation to make you aware of it – and have on many occasions, including in the Mustang’s Top Coupe win article – but it is still ultimately the buyer’s decision.
And while we would never argue that a good safety rating isn’t important, there are a number of reasons why the Mustang’s rating might actually matter less in this regard.
The latest-generation Mustang originally scored a thoroughly pathetic 2 stars under what were then new standards in the NCAP testing. New standards that saw a number of new cars fall short of the magic 5 stars, but none by quite as big a margin.
Put simply, they were designed under the old rules and tested under the new ones, so some were bound to get caught out. And the Mustang did.
The Mustang was revised this year and grabbed an extra star – only thanks to extra electronic safety tech added – which is still actually not good enough.
But here’s the thing with that – while there are some issues with front passenger protection (it scored 72 per cent in front occupant protection) the major downfall for the Mustang comes from rear seat occupant protection, where it scored a truly dismal 32 per cent.
But given that the reality is that most Mustangs won’t see much, shall we say ‘‘rear seat action’’ (given its relative impracticality) then it does become less of an issue in that buying decision.
Then if you consider the fact that even a car that gets just a 3 star rating in the current test is at least as safe, if not safer, in an actual crash than a 5 star car of just a few years ago, things head even further into a grey area.
We certainly would never recommend buying a Mustang if you regularly carry children in the back seat, as they fared by far the worst in the NCAP testing, but for singles, childless couples or empty-nesters who don’t carry kids (or other passengers) around in the back, then it is most likely a 4 star car in a realistic, every day (just not official) sense.
And a massively fun and cool one at that.
The NCAP crash ratings are an important point of comparison and, of course, every car should be engineered to get top marks, but it still comes down to individual choice.
And car of the year awards can only provide some small information for that choice, certainly not make it.
I’m still not convinced the Mustang should have got an award, but I can see the sense in why it did. Plus it is also very cool. Although I think I might have mentioned that before.