ANCAP readies 2020 reality check for car-makers

Australia’s leading crash test authority says it will expand its regime next year to better reflect accidents on the road and the vehicles that Aussies are purchasing.

From January 1, 2020, new vehicle manufacturers will face new protocols under the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) and its European equivalent, Euro NCAP.

The traditional frontal offset test that has underpinned crash testing for nearly 25 years will adapt to a moving target that will measure and assess impact on both the vehicle and the barrier on the receiving end.

And in what is being described as the “last remaining design elements” required to totally eliminate road fatalities in ordinary circumstances, vehicles will also be tested for centre airbags designed to protect occupants from striking each other during a collision.

In a wide-ranging interview with carsales, ANCAP chief James Goodwin said revised parameters would better reflect different sizes of vehicles on Australian roads.

“We test vehicles in different segments and different sizes of vehicles. If you go back to the 1990s when that testing protocol was developed, people were driving a sedan or a station wagon version of the sedan,” Goodwin explained.

“You had a big car and a small car, and some agricultural utes on the road – that’s what the car park was in the mid-1990s.

“Now we’ve got micro cars, all the traditional sizes of SUVs, we’ve got those traditional three-box vehicles and the big volume-selling vehicles, high-riding utes. The marketplace and road is changing.”

Goodwin said the revised frontal offset test in particular would provide more relevance to consumers, balancing the advantage that larger vehicles typically receive because of their size.

“We’re going to start measuring the impact on the honeycomb,” he said. “At the moment, we’re only really evaluating the test vehicle and how it performs; that tends to favour large vehicles because they’ve been bottoming out into the block. But in the real world that’s not how it happens,

“If you think a larger, heavier vehicle is getting an advantage in the current test because it is running into something that is smaller than it, it is now no longer going to get an on-paper advantage because we’re going to start measuring how much damage it does to the other vehicle. It makes it much more realistic.”

The timing of changes to frontal offset parameters is particularly pertinent; not only are more consumers steering towards larger SUVs and utes, take-up of heavier electric cars is also increasing.

Goodwin anticipated the advent of tougher tests would coincide with more dual ratings being applied to new models. For example, a four-star score for entry-level variants and five stars for other models grades, which is likely to be the case with the new Hyundai Venue and Kia Seltos because base versions lack cyclist detection.

Of Australia’s current new-vehicle fleet, 96 per cent have been crash tested. Of those, 92 per cent have a five-star safety rating.

“It’s probably going to be harder for larger, heavier vehicles,” Goodwin said. “And electric vehicles are much heavier than traditional internal combustion vehicles, which is another reason for the change.

“Broadly we’re understanding the different vehicles that are now mixing together on the roads and bringing in a proper comparison test for that.”

Goodwin said centre airbags loomed as the next critical safety step-change for car-makers. As such, ANCAP protocol in 2020 will also take in a new ‘far-side impact’ test. Initially, the testing will likely be performed in-house by manufacturers before being evaluated by testing authorities.

“What we’re measuring in this test now is how the occupants interact with the internal elements of the car and also how they interact with each other,” the ANCAP chief explained.

“We have these tragic circumstances where two occupants can actually kill or injure each other because they knock their heads together in a side impact crash.

“One of the only ways of counteracting that will be a centre airbag. This is one of those last remaining design elements where we think we can actually almost reduce to zero the death or serious injury between the occupants in the car.”

In addition, ANCAP and Euro NCAP will test autonomous emergency braking (AEB) systems in junction and reversing scenarios to provide more detail to buyers.

“We already expect vehicles fitted with AEB to detect the rear of another car, as well as pedestrians or cyclists,” Goodwin said.

“Next year, we’re introducing a new scenario called junction or intersection, where it not only identifies the rear of a test vehicle, but it identifies it turning across the oncoming vehicle. We’re looking at trying to stop those T-bone collisions – that may be a software update, or it will need to be calibrated for the side of vehicles.

“We’re going to be scoring and testing AEB in reverse, too – the rear-cross traffic alert function.”