Award-winning electric car rated ZERO out of five by safety watchdog
A SAFETY watchdog has issued a rare zero-star rating to one of Britain’s top-selling family cars.
The electric Renault Zoe received the dismal score from crash test experts at EuroNCAP – making it the third car to ever receive the worst-possible score for passenger safety.
Tests on the latest model revealed passengers face the ‘potential threat of serious injury and threat to life in the event of an accident’.
Experts rated the Zoe just 43 per cent for adult occupant protection – the lowest score for 11 years – and 52 per cent for child occupant protection. And it scored a shocking 14 per cent for the absence of common modern safety features – including a lack of autonomous emergency braking (AEB) and lane-departure warning systems designed to stop cars drifting.
Crash test bosses said the most alarming result was in the sideimpact ‘pole test’ which replicates impacts involving a vehicle travelling sideways into rigid roadside objects such as trees.
A third of such crashes are fatal or serious.
Dramatic footage on the Zoe showed an intruding pole colliding with a test dummy’s head.
The report from Thatcham Research, which represents EuroNCAP in the UK, noted that the resulting red body parts on the dummy highlighted ‘a potential threat to life in the event of an accident’. It concluded: ‘The Renault Zoe, a vehicle in the Supermini class, becomes only the third car in Euro NCAP’s history to achieve a zero-star rating.’
Testing bosses said the performance was disappointing as Renault was the first car-maker to achieve the full five-star rating in 2001.
Renault Zoe’s fall from grace is even more disturbing as an earlier version received a top five-star rating when it was originally tested in 2013. To add to Renault’s woes, the French car-maker’s Romanian-based budget brand Dacia scored the next worst score – just one star – with its new Spring model, which is not currently sold in the UK.
Priced from £26,595, after the £2,500 government green grant, the Renault Zoe is one of the UK’s top-selling electric cars and has won a host of awards. The new third generation Zoe is on track to sell more than 12,000 over two years..
The European New Car Assessment Programme – known as EuroNCAP – has shone a light on car safety since 1997 and caused a stir when the popular Rover 100 was given an infamous bottom one-star rating out of a then maximum four stars – at a time when a zero rating didn’t exist.
Renault said it ‘acknowledges’ the damning results saying that orders made from March will include ‘as standard’ the Advanced Emergency Braking System.
It insisted: ‘Above all, Renault Zoe E-Tech Electric is a safe vehicle and complies with all regulatory safety standards.’