Doubtless you’ve seen the mainstream media headlines. Zero stars - sounds pretty dire, right? But this is really just another ANCAP botch. The Mitsubishi Express is fine - for a van. In the context of contemporary vans you can buy, it’s neither excellent nor terrible. I’d call it about average. THE BOOK: 'On BS' by professor Harry G Frankfurt -
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I would make the case that this is the typical mode of operation for a vehicle such as this. Urban speeds. One dude. He’s the dude who needs protecting. The driver. In a life-threatening crash, which is likely to be a clipping head-on, not unlike ANCAP’s 64km/h standardised offset frontal crash, he needs protecting.
The Hyundai iLoad has a four-star rating, according to the technical report on ANCAP’s website. That’s for the current model introduced in June 2017. But it crashed worse than the Express, for the driver, in that test. I’ll show you. Green is ‘good’. Yellow is ‘acceptable’ and orange is ‘marginal’.
These icons are a cut and paste from ANCAP’s and Euro NCAP’s technical reports. It’s exactly the same tightly controlled laboratory crash test in both cases: 40 per cent offset front; 64km/h, deformable barrier. Quite a severe test.
Renault Trafic (which is Express with different badges) here. iLoad there. More orange equals ‘worse’ - it’s really that simple.
Let’s do another popular van. Ford Transit Custom. Current model. Five stars on ANCAP’s website. ANCAP’s results are a cut and paste of EuroNCAP’s, which found that the crash outcome for the driver of the Ford Transit Custom was once again worse than for the Trafic/Express.
Express did not crash badly. In the standardised offset frontal crash test it protects the driver better than a four-star iLoad or a five-star Ford Transit Custom. Deal with it.
Express earned sufficient points for two stars on crashworthiness based on its so-called ‘adult occupant protection’ rating, but got zero because it lacks AEB and other so-called ‘safety assistance’ features
Here’s the thing: Hyundai did the iLoad’s hair and makeup in 2017. It’s a pretty old platform. The underlying vehicle was introduced in 2008. ANCAP decided to apply 2011 test scores to the 2017 and onwards models. So, today’s iLoad wears a 10-year-old four-star test score derived using 10-year-old crashworthiness standards, despite being introduced in 2017. So those tests are 10 years out of date, but the rating is (quote-unquote) ‘current’.
At least, it is proffered as if current. In other words it pops up in the search results on ANCAP’s website when you select ‘current models only’. I wonder how many people actually realise that ‘current models’ is not the same thing as ‘current ratings’ in ANCAP’s universe?
Ford did the Transit Custom’s hair and makeup in September of 2019. The underlying vehicle was introduced in 2014. Here in Australia, ANCAP decided to cut and paste Euro NCAP’s 2012 tests onto the late-2019 Transit Custom. So today’s Transit Custom gets a five-star rating that is nine years older than the vehicle itself.
But Express (which is six years old) got tested to all the current - and far more severe - test protocols despite being introduced as a Renault Trafic back in 2015. Any way you look at this, it’s 50 lashes with the spiked bull-whip for the Express, and a week in the tropics for the other two.
The former Soviet bureaucracy could not have done a worse job organising this.
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