When most people think about serious crashes, images of walking-pace events with absolutely no panel damage seldom come to mind. Yet this is exactly what happens when a car cleans up a kid in the driveway. The enormity of it is made worse because the injured child is often a relative of the driver. These events generally don’t make the front page but they’re common enough (occurring once a week on average). Parents, hold that thought.

Astute observers of the WASP scoring process will note that, on dynamic tests alone, Astra rates a comparatively lowly seventh. What elevated it to the bronze medal was its second-to-none result in the reversing visibility test. A two-year-old child remains visible behind the car right down to 1.6 metres – an impressive result, particularly when compared to similar-sized vehicles like Civic (5.43 metres), Camry (6.29 metres) and Lancer (6.9 metres).



WASP is a test of crash-avoidance capability, not just dynamics. Reversing vision rates a maximum of five points out of the 100 on offer. It just so happens that, at stumps, the entire field spread out over about eight points – and the reversing vision field spread out over something like 3.9 points. That means reversing vision results, though small, had the capacity to upset the dynamics apple-cart. The cards simply fell Astra’s way, in just the same way as they didn’t, for example, with Aurion.

Some might feel jaded that the scoring process allows such last-minute re-jigging. We’d submit that a driveway run-over is every bit as terrible as shunting a power pole, and in a lot of ways it’s all the more preventable.



Astra is quite competent at emergency braking and both steady and transient cornering at urban speeds. It’s a glacial overtaker, however, and mediocre at the high-speed lane change and the hot lap. But when it comes to seeing a child at the rear, Astra is absolutely unbeatable.