How is vehicle safety measured?

At the AA we always encourage buyers to find the safest vehicle that their budget allows.

According to Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency research, a driver in a one-star rated vehicle is 90 per cent more likely to die or sustain a serious injury in a crash than if they were driving a five-star rated vehicle.

There are now three methods used in NZ to rate vehicle safety; the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), Rightcar Used Car Safety Ratings (UCSR)and the recently added Vehicle Safety Risk Rating (VSRR).

ANCAP

Founded in 1993, ANCAP is the independent vehicle safety authority for Australasia, and conducts tests on new passenger, sports utility (SUV) and light commercial vehicles (LCV) entering NZ and Australia. It’s not mandatory for manufacturers to submit a vehicle for ANCAP crash testing, so not all new vehicles receive a rating.

Tested vehicles receive a star rating between one and five (with five being the highest) based on results from a selection of crash tests carried out in a strictly controlled laboratory environment by ANCAP or Euro NCAP.

The target in order to achieve five stars changes to reflect safety technology advances. So a car awarded five stars in 2011 will no longer meet the same criteria in 2021, for example.

One of the benefits of ANCAP scores is that you’re comparing apples with apples - the rating was given for the tested vehicle of that year, which can be used to compare others of the same age and style. The ANCAP safety ratings of a vehicle are used by Rightcar for six years from the first date of model manufacture; after that real world crash data is used.

UCSR

For vehicles without a current ANCAP rating, UCSR is another indicator of vehicle safety when purchasing a used car. These safety ratings are created by using records from over eight million vehicles involved in policereported driver injury crashes across Australia and NZ.

While UCSR assess the risk of death or serious injury resulting in hospitalisation of a driver involved in a crash, it doesn’t assess the risk of being involved in a crash in the first place.

“Safer Pick” vehicles listed in the ratings have extra crash avoidance features fitted. These cars will have a five-star rating, Electronic Stability Control (ESC) and reversing assist technology (reversing sensors, a reversing camera or both).

Australia has strict rules on imported vehicles, so a lot of the Japanese imported vehicles we see in NZ may not be on the road in Australia. In a number of cases, there will not be enough information to be able to accurately identify the type of vehicle to be able to assign a credible safety rating. In those cases, no safety rating will be displayed. The same goes for new cars that don’t receive an ANCAP crash test rating.

VSRR

The VSRR assesses vehicles that don't have an ANCAP or UCSR safety rating. It's used where there are too few of these vehicles to provide enough data, so the rating is based on the average crash rating of similar vehicles from the same year of manufacture.

How do I know what rating to look for?

Our fleet is made up of used import and NZ-new vehicles, which is a challenge: two imported vehicles may not share the same specification.

Many NZ-new vehicles can be differentiated from the equivalent Japanese import thanks to a different name. For example, a Honda Jazz would be NZ-new and a Honda Fit would be a used import. But some cars keep the same name no matter which country they were first registered in, like the Suzuki Swift.

Some vehicles imported from Japan are very closely related to their NZ new variants, but some aren’t. A Japanese domestic specification vehicle might only have two airbags, whereas a NZnew model might have six airbags and stability control to ensure a superior level of safety.