The FIAT Punto Got a Zero-Star Rating in Euro NCAP Crash Test

[GTPNewsWire]

This is the discussion thread for a recent post on GTPlanet:

[URL='https://www.gtplanet.net/fiats-punto-sets-new-unwelcome-crash-test-record/']The FIAT Punto Got a Zero-Star Rating in Euro NCAP Crash Test[/URL]

This article was published by Andrew Evans (@Famine) on December 13th, 2017 in the Automotive News category.

 

[kikie]

At least the Fiat 500 has three stars.

 

[Famine]

Absolutely unprecedented score. For reference, the worst car Euro NCAP ever tested before this finished up looking like this:

Although the Punto isn't as structurally bad - it scored two stars in every crash category (with some concerning scores for the front seat passenger in head-on, and child closest the side impact) - but it rated at 0% in the Safety Assist section. Euro NCAP requires a car to score in all four categories, so it wasn't eligible to score any stars at all.

 

[UnkaD]

I understand crash tests, but failing for lack of hand-holding driving assists? Not sure I could take the scores seriously. The car isn't at fault for the driver's lack of awareness.

 

[Famine]

I understand crash tests, but failing for lack of hand-holding driving assists? Not sure I could take the scores seriously. The car isn't at fault for the driver's lack of awareness.

The point was to show that cars considered safe as recently as five years ago - the Punto scored three stars originally - are absolutely incomparable to modern cars of the same type. And the Punto is still for sale, which is the important part: a brand new car that scores three stars is better than a facelifted "2017" car that's actually from 2005 and scored three stars when it was new.

The Punto is the most obvious example, but six other cars also lost star ratings. They were originally five-star cars, but are now three-star cars - so someone may buy one over a brand new car thinking they're comparable because both have a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating, but the old car still sold as new is only a three-star equivalent.


The Punto only scored 51% for Adult Occupant safety, and 43% for Child Occupant safety. Compare to the Kia Stonic, a car scoring 85% and 84% respectively. Until today, both were three-star cars, the Stonic from its 2017 test and the Punto from its 2005 one. They're not really comparable, but a consumer might think they were - both are new cars, sold as new, in showrooms. Which is kinda the point.

And it's not just driving assists. The Punto has no seatbelt reminders - that thing that bongs when someone is sat down but hasn't got a belt on - other than for the driver. There's no standard side-impact airbags. There's no lane departure warning, even as an option...

Safety Assists is one of the four scoring categories at Euro NCAP (I've mentioned two above, and the other is Pedestrian Safety). A car must register a score in all four categories to get a star rating. With no score possible in the Safety Assists category, the Punto can't score any stars at all.


And remember, the Renault Megane once lost two stars (four to two) for an inadequate visual seatbelt reminder function.

 

[Andyc709292]

Can't get behind crash testing and overall safety including the binging annoyance that I get when I put a 2 liter bottle of milk and a loaf of bread on the passenger seat.

And lane departure? Surely a basic & essential skill is being able to drive within the lines unless it's in everyone's interest not to.

 

[UnkaD]

The point

Can't argue against all that. I guess it's all on the consumers to do their research, which is expected. Still, while the assists and reminders can be helpful for some people, I don't think they should be made mandatory.

 

[zdenko]

Can't get behind crash testing and overall safety including the binging annoyance that I get when I put a 2 liter bottle of milk and a loaf of bread on the passenger seat.

And lane departure? Surely a basic & essential skill is being able to drive within the lines unless it's in everyone's interest not to.

Yep 100% with you.
Within the last 5 or so years the whole star rating system has gone to crap.
It all started off good when they were looking at structural strength and safety systems that actually do something, ie Airbags, ABS etc,
Now all they worry about is gimmicky rubbish sensors that have nothing to with the real safety of the car. All crap they put in because you have people driving cars that have no actual interest in driving. They would rather be mucking around with their Android Auto or other crap in the car.

The biggest area of the star rating that really bugs me is pedestrian safety. These systems suck in country Australia as if you hit any animal, it literally makes the car a right off when those bonnet pins fire. If you are too stupid to look where you are going because you are busy looking at your phone whilst walking, you deserve to be hit. Don't mark cars down because they destroy themselves instead of what they hit.

Our local Australian media keep hammering cars for not having crap like AEB and lane departure, but these are things I don't want in a car, as they are just bloody annoying.
They don't factor in real things like measured stopping distance, quality tyres, good handling and dynamics etc.


Now what they really need to do is divide the structural safety aspect into its own separate section with its own clear score which factors in the actual safety for the dummy.
They can then have a passive safety section that scores all the rubbish I don't want.
Have the score separate for 2 sections.


This would fix the star rating on a car like the Mustang here.
It only got 2 stars here, but most of it was due to lack of rubbish sensors systems not being on Australian delivered cars. Structurally the car is reasonably good and would have given it 4 stars on an older version of the star system.

Note our system is ANCAP which is literally much the as NCAP. They quite often just use the NCAP results.

 

[kjeldsen]

Spring Cleaning

 

[Mad Matt]

I have to say I agree that some of the points the Punto now fails on are a bit OTT. Lack of seat belt warning lights! These days I think for most people putting on a seat belt is a reflex and for those who don't a light or a bell isn't going to make a difference. We're not in the 1970s any more when people had to be persuaded to do it.

Lane departure.... a bit of a gimmick in my opinion.

On the other hand side air bags are important.

Overall though this has lowered my respect for Euro NCAP ratings.

 

[daan]

Absolutely unprecedented score. For reference, the worst car Euro NCAP ever tested before this finished up looking like this:

View attachment 699241

I love how the airbag goes off on the "Metro", but the deflection of the steering column takes it away from the driver's head and he ends up completely missing the airbag and headbutts the A pillar.

 

[PD4WG]

Interestingly the original Grande Punto was one of the earliest cars in it's class to get 5 stars back in 2005. I was pretty surprised initially when seeing this, but now I look at it in more detail it seems that things might not have changed as much as it would seem. This is because while in those 2005 tests, the Grande Punto did indeed score 5 stars, that was merely the adult occupant score. The child occupant and pedestrian protection scores were both 3 stars, so if back then the system was similar to the current one in that it needed each category to be as high as the overall rating, we would see that without these assists, the car would only have gone from a 3star car to a 2 star car in 12 years.

 

[yas]

Overall though this has lowered my respect for Euro NCAP ratings.

Well same happened to my respect for IIHS ratings. Top safety pick + or whatever got stronger requirements this year. Sounds good but looking at them, they don't make so much sense. Headlings, maybe ok, but ease of operation of child seats latch?! What does that do to overall safety? And this is the main divider between the top "safety" models. Sorry but what's the next big important safety thingy - comfort of passenger seat? Shape of glovebox? Safety is getting something quite abstract, when it should be very strict.

 

[Joey D]

I sort of get the reasoning for docking the car for not having any safety assists. The safest thing to do for passengers is to prevent them from getting into a crash in the first place.

For the most part, we're all gearheads. This means we take driving more seriously than others. But think about the average person that views a car as an appliance, they might not be the best driver in the world and having those assists not only keeps them safer, but everyone else around them. This is exactly why I think autonomous cars are a fantastic idea too.

 

[Leonidae@MFT]

Now that is a crushing result.

 

[Famine]

Within the last 5 or so years the whole star rating system has gone to crap.
It all started off good when they were looking at structural strength and safety systems that actually do something, ie Airbags, ABS etc,
Now all they worry about is gimmicky rubbish sensors that have nothing to with the real safety of the car.

Making crashes survivable is now at its limit. Just as seatbelts, then airbags (not the one in the Metro, obviously) reached the limit of how many lives they could save, vehicle structures that dissipate energy are also at the limit of how many lives they could save. Just 750 car occupants were killed on the UK's roads last year with just under 8,000 seriously injured (or about 8,750 "killed and seriously injured", or "KSI"). Both are less than half the figures from 1997, and have been surprisingly static since 2010. So how do you reduce road deaths further?

On adult occupant and child occupant safety alone, almost every car tested since 2011 would score five stars. NCAP is a consumer body, and its purpose is to bring car safety information to consumers. How is it supposed to do that if everything gets five stars? How does the consumer distinguish between literally every car if they all have five stars?


The answer to both is active safety - safety that prevents the accident, rather than mitigates the results of it.

That means technology like ESP, roll-over prevention, AEB, lane departure warning/assist, and so on. And these systems don't just reduce vehicle occupant KSI rates either, but help reduce KSI among other road users, including pedestrians.

By including tests of active safety systems among the ratings, we're able to see which cars are less likely to result in deaths/injuries of any kind, not just the people in them.

It's crucial that you don't misunderstand the results. A five star car isn't better than a three star car at stopping you from dying in it. It's better than a three star car at stopping anyone from dying. And don't take the stars as an outright indicator - it's only better than a three star car of the same kind at it - Euro NCAP (and the various regional variants) results are only comparable within the same class of vehicle.


It's interesting that you bring up ABS as an example of "safety systems that actually do something", when it's one of the very earliest examples of an active safety system that takes control of a system away from a driver (by preventing them from applying an excess of braking) to assist them (by retaining steering control under full braking), but class other systems that do the same sort of thing for the same reasons - preventing the driver from making an input that would lead to a loss of control - are "gimmicky rubbish sensors"...

 

[Moglet]

Wow, that's really surprising....there are still Puntos from 2005 that run?

 

[zdenko]

It's interesting that you bring up ABS as an example of "safety systems that actually do something", when it's one of the very earliest examples of an active safety system that takes control of a system away from a driver (by preventing them from applying an excess of braking) to assist them (by retaining steering control under full braking), but class other systems that do the same sort of thing for the same reasons - preventing the driver from making an input that would lead to a loss of control - are "gimmicky rubbish sensors"...

Let me re-iterate and expand on what I said then.
Good systems. ABS, ESC, Roll over mitigation(just ESC programing). They control the car in mostly good ways when necessary. They generally do not cut in for no reason.
Here's a good one that EURO NCAP don't even count. Reversing camera's. Probably the most useful thing manufacturers fit these days, but they don't even factor them in for scoring. No one can see directly behind at the initial stage of reversing. You always are blind for the first metre or so.

Rubbish gimmicky sensors are the ones that to me that can cause harm by taking control when not required or annoy you whilst driving.
From experience I have had AEB start stopping the car in city traffic when it definitely should not. The car reckons it can read traffic better than me. Maybe it can, but I have never rear ended anyone. Luckily you can turn it off. I have only ever been in one very minor road accident where someone bumped me up the back and AEB would not have helped him as it was a heavily loaded Mercedes van that was tailing me and I stopped quickly at a red light speed camera.
Lane departure warning is just an annoyance. I find that the systems read the wrong lines and warn you for no reason. Not all the time, but it means you have to monitor the systems that is supposed to make driving easier. Sort of defeats the purpose of it. Switched off. So you are saying that there are now cars that now take control in these situations. That is just asking for trouble. So when the car turns the wrong way and causes a accident, who is at fault, the manufacturers or the drivers??? Just the same as autonomous cars, its a slippery legal downhill slope when you start taking control from the operator and giving it to a machine.