- Crash safety star ratings should be more widely understood. But they aren’t.
- Too many new vehicle buyers don’t understand how poorly equipped their bargain-basement car is.
- We help to explain how the crash safety ratings work. And South African crash safety standards don’t really exist.
South Africa has some of the best driving roads in the world. But also some of the worst, with traffic fatalities continuing to be staggeringly high. As evidenced by the recent festive season, with several horror crashes claiming many innocent South Africans.
Design, brand status, and in-car tech might guide new-car buying decisions, but the core decision point should always be safety. And that’s where buying a new car in South Africa gets very confusing.
Our crash safety standards are very low
Unlike the United States, Europe, and Australia, which have had pioneering and stringent new-vehicle crash-safety specifications for a long time, South Africa doesn’t. It’s partly due to poor transport policy and partly intentional.
‘Intentional?’ Yes. It costs a lot of money to upgrade cheap cars with all the required safety tech. In the market below R250 000, a few thousand Rands can have a huge influence on customer decisions. And a few thousand rands can be the difference between an unsafe and a safer budget car – if you understand what to look for.
This is the engineering reality that nobody likes talking about. The same model sold in Europe and South Africa can have wildly different core safety spec. Even if the cars look the same, there’s a missing safety module, sensor, actuator, or, worst, low-grade steel without a reinforcement structure in the bodyshell.
But why? Cost. South African transport policy does not enforce European-spec minimum safety standards. The reason? Because it wants to ensure that there are very affordable new cars for lower-income buyers.
Instead of using the globally recognised NCAP standards, cars sold in South Africa only need to meet the minimum standards set by the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS). And as some of the shockingly poor crash-safety performance of popular budget models in the local market shows, the NRCS has a weak or deliberately obtuse understanding of global vehicle crash-safety standards and trends.
The lack of a robust, international-standard crash-safety rating for the local market is even more absurd, given the quality of cars South Africa build for export. Models like the C-Class and X3, which are two of the safest cars, with the best structural crash integrity, you can buy.
Star ratings aren’t constant
The image above is from one of the worst crash-test failures of living memory: Rover’s 100, which dramatically failed a European crash test in the late 1990s. It also shows how unsafe ‘affordable’ small cars were when standards weren’t enforced, to ensure the required investment in better structural engineering.
Related Content:NCAP de-mystified
The 0 to 5-star crash-safety grading used globally by various NCAPs is also difficult to understand. Because it’s ever-evolving and there’s no enforced global standard, it's a disservice to new-car buyers who are trying to research.
This is what you need to know about NCAP crash safety star ratings. In the beginning, it was all about how the car performed in the actual crash. How well the structure absorbed energy and deflected it from harming passengers.
But even the cars with the best safety cells can no longer achieve a 4- or 5-star safety rating in the strictest NCAP tests. Why? Because there is an increased emphasis on crash-avoidance tech. You get awarded stars for autonomous driving tech and sensors that help avoid a crash.
Global NCAP rewards many tech features that have no impact on your car's actual structural integrity in a crash. But it still analyses core structural safety as a non-negotiaible, which makes it trustworthy.
The problem is emerging crash-test institutions, like India’s Bharat NCAP (BNCAP), founded in late 2023. The issue? Despite bargain cars with problematic structural integrity, like the i10 and Kwid, being built in India, they haven’t been tested by BNCAP. Which is bizarre, as they are made in India and could easily be sourced for testing at very low cost.
Steel quality matters
The reality is that even the best driver assistance systems (ABS, ESP, and crash alert sensors) can’t prevent other drivers from crashing into you. And when the collision happens, all the clever digital and mechanical tech that helps most cars go from 3- to 5-stars doesn’t mean anything. It’s all about the car’s structural integrity.
The most important thing to remember about crash safety testing is that a car’s steel safety cell needs to absorb a lot of impact energy. To keep you from suffering a critical injury.
Simply, it’s the integrity and quality of that steel safety cell’s mechanical design and material choices that are often the difference between surviving a severe crash and not. In smaller cars, it’s even more critical, because they have so much less material body structure, to absorb impact energy.
The reality is that several bargain new cars on the South African market have very poorly designed safety cells. Built to a budget, not a European or American standard. And that means an absence of ultra-high-grade steel and intricate reinforcement structures, exactly the kind of mechanical design and materials that increase your chances of survival in a crash.
Think global – act local
New cars like the Indian-built Hyundai Grand i10 and Renault Kwid have very poor structural crashworthiness because the steel grades and safety cell engineering are of a much lower standard. It is a case of these cars being engineered to a price, not to a standard.
It is why the Kwid or Indian-built (Grand) i10 can’t legally be sold in Europe. Or Australia. But there is an i10 with enhanced safety features and better structural integrity, engineered and developed by Hyundai. This i10 is built in Turkey, and legally sold in Europe, illustrating the discrepancies between global markets and safety.
Kwid and Grand i10 can legally be sold in South Africa, despite scoring dismally low in Global NCAP testing. Just like the Datsun Go, which went before them. How? Because, despite a local automotive industry that builds some of the world's most sophisticated and safest luxury cars, the South African government sets the lowest possible safety standards. And some brands choose to leverage that chasm in regulatory rigour, something that can never be in the best interest of vulnerable new-car buyers at the bottom of the market.
