What are Used Car Safety Ratings?

Most of us know that ANCAP provides safety ratings to assist buyers to find out just how safe a new car is, but how can you check the safety of an older, used vehicle you want to buy?

Fortunately, there’s a resource called Used Car Safety Ratings, which is provided by a partnership of government agencies and researchers that includes Victorian road safety body, the Transport Accident Commission (TAC).

The TAC’s Acting Manager, Road Safety Research, Insights and Evaluation, Dr David Young, explains the essence of Used Car Safety Ratings (UCSR).

“USCR is exactly what it says on the tin, which is a rating that tells you the safety for used cars that have been around for a while, and don’t have a current valid ANCAP score,” says Dr Young.

Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) estimates the Used Car Safety Ratings by vehicle make, model and series. MUARC collates statistics from police reports of crashes (more than nine million vehicles across Australia and New Zealand so far) on which statistical analysis is undertaken to estimate the ratings. MUARC conducts a new study every year to analyse the latest data and ensure the ratings are up to date.

You can check out how safe a used car is before you buy it by looking up its UCSR on the How Safe is Your Car? website run by Victoria’s TAC.

Dr Young explains the difference between the UCSR and ANCAP ratings. “The difference between UCSR and ANCAP is that the UCSR are based on real-world injury outcomes to people involved in crashes on the road; that’s why we have to wait for a while to get those ratings. Sufficient involvement of cars in crashes is required to understand the real-world crash performance of cars with statistical accuracy and confidence.

“So the Used Car Safety Ratings metrics are based on real-world safety performance. It’s not laboratory-based performance, like ANCAP, with a car crashing into a crash barrier, in standardised test conditions,” continues Dr Young. “Instead, UCSRs are based on what happens in real road crashes with other real cars at the speeds we travel at.”

These UCSRs historically have provided an indication of the relative risk of death or serious injury to the driver in a crash compared with other vehicles on the road through the publication of a Driver Protection star rating.

“The reason UCSR has only a driver protection score and does not consider other passengers is because police crash reports only reliably report on the driver of a vehicle and their injury outcome,” explains Dr Young. “A passenger may, or may not, have been in the car and may, or may not, have been recorded in the crash report.”

Each vehicle is scored out of five, although cars that were sold in small numbers only or are too old to reliably identify make and model details from the information available to MUARC may not be rated.

“If there’s no current safety rating it’s not necessarily that it is an unsafe car; it’s just that we’re unsure on how it has really performed on the road; there is inadequate data to rate it,” says Dr Young.

The UCSR assessment also takes into account a vehicle’s ‘aggressivity rating’, giving a measure of the safety impact a vehicle has on other road users. This is an estimate of the death or serious injury risk the rated vehicle poses to other road users in a crash.

This includes occupants of other vehicles as well as vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists.

The level of protection afforded to other road users is linked to the mass of a vehicle as well as its design. Big, heavy four-wheel drives and dual-cab utes generally do not perform well in this rating because they are typically more likely to injure other road users in a crash.

There are, however, examples of large vehicles that do perform well in this respect, proving that manufacturers who put in the effort can in fact design cars that are safe for everyone, and not just the vehicle’s occupants.

Part of the latest UCSR release is the move to a new ‘overall’ safety rating, which is a better measure of the overall safety performance of the vehicle in protecting everyone on the roads.

The new rating combines the protection for drivers and protection for other road users in a way that represents the real-world contribution of these measures to overall road trauma. The overall rating also includes a new crash avoidance assessment, which rates the fitment of proven active safety features to the vehicle.

Modern cars have active safety technologies like Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) and Lane Keep Assist (LKA) that can assist the driver to avoid a crash. The fitment of these features and their effectiveness are combined as the new crash avoidance rating.

The new overall rating considers the protection offered to all road users, and rewards cars that are designed to be safe for those both inside and outside of the vehicle, as well as those able to support the driver to avoid a crash. For a car to perform well it must be safe for its driver, but it must also have an exterior design that mitigates serious injury to occupants of other vehicles and minimises injury to vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.

This new rating has been developed because of a changing philosophy to road trauma, says Dr Young. “Everyone who prioritises safety looks first for the people inside the vehicle, and that’s for good reason,” he says. “That’s very important, but if we take a step back, to see what we’re trying to achieve in Victoria and globally (that is, no road trauma), the fact of the matter is we are not going to get there if we build big, strong tanks that only protect the people who are inside the vehicle. We’re only going to get there if the vehicle protects everyone, or if it can avoid a crash altogether.”

Our region has already seen a successful shift to this new approach, says Dr Young. “New Zealand has already made this transition – they’re already reporting against an overall crash protection metric. A lot of the work they did with their community and their decision-makers to make that shift was based on the fact that this measure is much better aligned to what they are trying to achieve, in terms of reducing all road trauma, not just road trauma for certain people in certain cars. We need to reduce all road trauma as a society.”