ASEAN NCAP: single unified safety rating for every 2017 car model!

Kuala Lumpur: The New Car Assessment Program for Southeast Asian Countries (ASEAN NCAP) announces that they are going to propose a single unified safety rating for every car model that will make official appearance in the year 2017. This step has been proposed as an action of receiving complaints from consumers on violation of safety specification by multiple rating systems.

ASEAN NCAP Secretary-General, Mr. Khairil Anwar Abu Kassim stated that the action of removing such confusion will surely have some serious impact on the safety system of 2017 models. This will remove discrepancy in the safety figures of different variants of a specific car. Thus, buyers will find it easy to purchase a car looking after its safety aspect.

“We found that the dual rating system has been manipulated by some manufacturers in their car advertisements,” Khairil said. “For example, a car model which received a three-star safety rating was marketed [with a five-star rating>, which was actually awarded to a different variant of the same model.”

After such irresponsible act detected by the safety systems, ASEAN NCAP is investigating various trims of the same model (also from different countries in the region). Kia Picanto is one of the examples, the car has been sold in Malaysia with six airbags as standard scored a four-star rating while the version offered in Thailand with no airbags netted no stars.

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In addition, ASEAN NCAP will start scoring a single overall rating for both adult occupant protection (AOP) and child occupant protection (COP) for a car, for which, the scores currently presented as separate star ratings. “It will be 50% for AOP and 25% for COP to ensure a vehicle receives the highest star award and also provides the best protection for the child inside a car,” he said.

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Safety assist technologies (SAT) such as ABS, stability control, blind spot monitoring and automated emergency braking (AEB) will also be evaluated within the next 14 months, contributing another 25% to the overall rating. “Crash avoidance is our next objective,” Khairil said. “This reflects our effort to put pressure on the car manufacturers to install more safety features and produce safer cars.”

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