How safe are the cars Australia drives? Car-safety comparisons are generally framed around crash-test results. But these are distilled for public consumption to the point that they are almost meaningless. Is a low five-star car really safer than one in the high fours?
It’s just not that simple.
Obviously, it’s better not to crash. The ‘six-star’ performance, if you like, is to miss. However comforting it is to be surrounded by eight airbags and five pyrotechnic seatbelt pre-tensioners, it’s unthinkable to be involved in the aftermath of their deployment. Missing – if only by the thickness of a cigarette paper – is maybe not the optimal result in traffic, but it’s a good one nonetheless.
The Wheels Active Safety Program (WASP) is, literally, the ‘missing’ link of safety ratings. The ability to miss is all we measure. Some cars miss in situations where others have already hit, big time, and we’re going to reveal which ones are which.
No other reference exists to inform consumers about the relative ‘active safety’ (crash-avoidance capability) of Australia’s most popular cars. WASP is a vital Australian public safety issue, as there are 22,000 serious injuries and 1600 deaths stemming from some 200,000 reported crashes annually. Cost, not including human suffering – $17 billion That’s 70 percent higher than the officially estimated impost of organised crime on our society. More than one in 10 reported crashes injures someone seriously; the chance of dying in a crash is almost one percent. Both probabilities are way too high to play Russian roulette with.
Crash mitigation – ‘passive safety’; making crashes marginally more survivable – still hogs the limelight. It’s also a vital, if somewhat overstated, road-safety element. Entire advertising campaigns (Subaru’s, for example) centre around five-star crashworthiness. Crash-mitigating hardware is itself a selling tool. You couldn’t squeeze yourself into an elevator packed with all the acronyms contrived to convince car buyers they are just one signature away from the safest vehicle on the road. (Toyota’s Corolla, for example, boasts GOA, MICS and WIL – Global Outstanding Assessment, Minimal Intrusion Cabin System and Whiplash Injury Lessening, plus a Safe-T-Cell.)
Crashes are reported, analysed statistically, broken down by severity and type, and the results are published in numerous reports. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has a public-domain online Fatal Road Crash Database, and the NSW RTA publishes an annual statistical statement called, somewhat unimaginatively, Road Traffic Crashes in NSW. These are enough to cure insomnia. Yet almost no analysis is done on crashes that are avoided, and why/how. There isn’t even a reporting system for that.
Until now.
FIVE THINGS TO SORT WHAT'S WASP
The cars Australia drives were selected by outright sales reported by industry statistician, Vfacts, for year-to-date at October 2007. Car companies were
asked to supply the most popular variant of each of the top-selling models. We got all of the market’s top 10, plus Focus, Astra, RAV4 and Territory.
Unfortunately, Ford was unable to supply us with its most popular Falcon model, the XT, instead giving us an atmo XR6 (its second best seller). So we shifted the XR6 sideways into the role of benchmark car, to provide the barometer against which all the rest might be judged. That left us with 13 contenders.
Last time we did a full-blown WASP on Australia’s most popular cars was in July 2005 (we WASPed SUVs in January 2007). A lot has changed in the market since then, including: new Commodore, Lancer, Aurion, Camry, Focus, Corolla, Civic and RAV4. We also removed the light commercials (Holden Rodeo and Toyota HiAce were entertaining, but irrelevant) to bolster the relevance to car buyers.
WASP results are based purely on the numbers because, in those critical few moments you get to deal with an on-road emergency, what a car can do is significantly more important than how it feels. All the test results are based on objective measurements.
Oran Park’s skid pan is a perfect venue for WASP testing because it has a straight that allows highway-speed brake testing, and 100+km/h lane changes, as well as on-limit manoeuvres at real-world urban speeds. WASP is about real-world relevance.
Wet testing has been ditched for WASP 2008. Why? Two reasons. First, water tends not really to tell us anything new. In reviewing both our two previous WASPs and the faster, harder, but similar Handling Olympics, it’s apparent that water degrades grip uniformly, but the relative performances of the vehicles don’t change much. Front-runners, back-markers and mid-fielders in the dry slalom, for example, tend to be the same front-runners, back-markers and mid-fielders when you open the taps. And, second, wet tracks are very hard to keep uniformly and consistently wet. Minor variations in results – second in the dry changing to third in the wet, for example – might be influenced significantly by our inability to keep conditions precisely constant. So we ditched wet circles and slaloms and added two more relevant crash-avoidance tests in their place.