All SUVs are not created equal on the crashworthiness front. So how does the 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe hope to compete with premium brands like Jeep, Audi and Land Rover? The answer might shock you.
Safety - crashworthiness - is very important. Road trauma costs Australians $30 billion a year. There’s only 23 million people living in Australia. The road trauma cost per capita is staggering - we're each paying $1300 annually to stem this bloody tide. Not to mention the profound personal cost. Safer vehicles are definitely part of the solution, and the 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe really does deliver on safety.
The 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe gets five stars - independently determined by ANCAP. The books, thankfully, can not be cooked on five-star crashworthiness - as some other SUV manufacturers have discovered. You won’t believe which vehicles fail to measure up.
This report is not speculation - the facts are determined by global NCAP - the independent crash testing authority.
To me, these results challenge perception and put the notion of what ‘premium’ really is, in perspective. Hyundai's latest Santa Fe has overtaken Land Rover, Audi and Jeep - at least in three clear cases.
In fact, common Japanese and South Korean cars routinely deliver five stars - so you’d think five stars on premium vehicles is a given, a done deal. It’s not like the vehicles intrinsically presented insufficient structure for the engineers to work with.
Land Rover, Jeep and Audi get away with this abject failure to protect their buyers without so much a peep from the media - but imagine if the boot were on the other foot. Imagine if Hyundai were on four stars; with the others on five. The motoring press would have a feeding frenzy - just one more example of inbuilt systematic bias in the motoring media.
Those three allegedly premium brands should hang their heads in shame. And you should put put perception to one side: They are a safety design disgrace. Corner-cutting writ large, up the big end of town.
In every crash, there’s a window of about 80 milliseconds. A wafer-thin slice of mayhem in the time domain during which the grim reaper can reach in and snatch you, or someone you love. The Hyundai Santa Fe is far more protective when that window opens. And that’s not a joke.
28 авг 2024
