ANCAP: Five stars for Chery Omoda 5

The 2023 Chery Omoda 5 has been awarded a five-star safety rating by the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), following the release of the all-new small SUV in March.

Marking the first time any Chery model has received a maximum ANCAP rating in Australia, the five-star result follows calibration tweaks to the Omoda 5’s overly sensitive driver safety aids before launch.

Single-handedly relaunching the Chinese brand in Australia this year, the Chery Omoda 5 received an 87 per cent score for adult occupant protection, 88 for child occupant protection, 68 per cent for vulnerable road user protection and 83 per cent for its safety assist systems.

Tested against its 2020-2022 protocols, ANCAP said the Omoda 5’s strong safety performance was headlined by “one of the best scores recorded for vehicle-to-vehicle ‘compatibility’ seen to date”.

‘Good’ and ‘adequate’ marks frequent the Omoda 5’s ANCAP score card, however, with testers expressing concerns about the design of the dashboard, which contains some hard elements that could result in knee injuries for the driver and front passenger in the event of a frontal offset collision.

Another blemish was the apparent malfunction of a side curtain airbag that didn’t “open as intended” in the side impact tests and therefore marred any chance of a ‘good’ score in this key criteria.

Nevertheless, neither of these shortcomings resulted in ‘marginal’ or ‘poor’ safety performance assessments from ANCAP, allowing the Omoda 5 to join the bulk of its Chinese, Korean and Japanese small SUV rivals in securing a five-star safety rating, in line with the five-star Euro NCAP rating it achieved last year.

ANCAP executives said they were pleased to see Chery’s improvement in safety since the Chinese car-maker’s vehicles were last tested here back in 2011, when the J11 small SUV scored two stars and the J1 city-car was awarded just three.

“This five-star ANCAP safety rating for the Omoda 5 is a marked improvement on the results seen by Chery’s original market entrants a decade ago,” said ANCAP Chief Executive Officer, Carla Hoorweg.

“Chery has made significant strides to reach the five-star standard and we encourage them to continue to refine and improve the performance of their vehicles with future new models and model updates.”

The five-star rating applies to all versions of the Chery Omoda 5 sold in Australia, which are powered by a 1.5-litre turbo-petrol engine and fitted as standard with autonomous emergency braking (AEB), lane assist, lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, rear-cross traffic alert with rear AEB, blind spot monitoring, tyre pressure monitoring and speed sign recognition.

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