The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

Ford's additions to the Mustang's spec sheet have won the car an extra star on its safety rating, but without a new full crash test, Euro NCAP could be selling the Mustang short
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Earlier this week we reported on how the Ford Mustang has been made a teeny, tiny bit safer, according to Euro NCAP’s standards. But is a three-star rating really as poor as it sounds in the modern age, or does Euro NCAP need to wind its neck in?

First, it’s important to understand the four safety areas that NCAP rates: adult occupant, child occupant, pedestrian and active safety systems. The first three are mostly passive, where points are scored based on how well the standard car minimises damage to humans in a crash. There’s a spec-related element to these as well, so how well it should minimise damage on paper matters too. Pop-up bonnet fitted as standard? Points in the bag before the test even starts. The safety systems are tested too, so lane-keeping and auto braking setups have to prove what they claim.

The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

Euro NCAP doesn’t publicly detail the exact breakdown of points awarded for various spec sheet features. The assumption is that, given the four test areas are all marked out of a maximum 100 per cent, each area swings a quarter of the overall result into the pot. Is that always fair, though?

Take the Mustang and compare it to one of those God-awful seven-seat MPVs you always hope you’ll never have to buy but will probably end up getting anyway when you have kids. They’re there to do a practical job, and as part of that you want a family bus to offer maximum safety for the loud ones in the back. But a Mustang? Are you really going to use it as a family car?

The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

The reason I ask this is that the Ford gets an uncomfortable-looking 32 per cent for child occupant protection. Most cars get scores in the high 70s or 80s. As an explanation, the Mustang lacks seatbelt pretensioners and load limiters in the back, and there’s no seatbelt reminder beep for the back seats. It does have Isofix for anchoring kiddie seats, though, potentially making the seatbelts irrelevant for young kids. With that in mind, the insanely low grade in safety class seems a bit harsh for this car.

Next, let’s talk about pedestrian safety. We’re not going to dispute that accidents happen, but frankly they seem to be at least as often the fault of the pedestrian as of the driver, and it’s the driver who gets kicked in the financial teeth when their pop-up bonnet costs four figures to set back into place just because some jay-walking idiot was texting instead of looking for traffic. Anyway…

The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

The Mustang gets 78 per cent for jay-walker safety, which is equal fourth-best recorded so far this year. That’s good, then, right? Yes, but it’s apparently not enough to salvage more stars. Why? Because the good old-fashioned crash test dummy says not. Our lovely Mustang only gets 72 per cent for adult occupant protection, when even the latest small cars are climbing into the 90s.

The thing is, though, despite mods that now mean your face won’t hit the steering wheel through the airbag any more (yay), the official adult occupant score has stayed the same because Euro NCAP hasn’t physically re-crash-tested it. Instead, it has an equation that predicts what the car would score: 74 per cent instead of 72; not enough to win a fourth star.

The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

We contacted Euro NCAP for comment. Aled Williams, Programme Manager at the company, said this:

“The adult occupant protection (AOP) score has not changed as we did not conduct additional crash tests on the Mustang. Structurally, the car is identical to the one we tested previously. Ford showed that the restraint systems have been improved to prevent the ‘bottoming out’ that we saw in the original frontal ODB test.

“However, the difference this would make to the score is very small: AOP would score 28.162 points (rounds to 74 per cent) instead of 27.662 points (rounds to 72 per cent) and there would be no influence on the overall star rating.

“We wanted to reflect the much more significant changes they had made to safety equipment, such as AEB and lane assistance. This has improved their score in the Safety Assist section from a very poor 16 per cent to a creditable 61 per cent, and this area is no longer the limiting factor for the overall rating (child occupant protection now limits the rating to three stars).”

The Ford Mustang Is A Safer Car Than The Euro NCAP Results Suggest

Following on from an earlier point, it doesn’t seem fair to stain the whole car with a sub-standard rating because of missing seatbelt warning beeps when it’s so rarely going to be used to carry kids anyway. Going by Euro NCAP’s comment, If results were loaded towards that car’s intended purpose (away from child occupant protection, in this case) the Mustang would be a four-star car. That, to us, seems fairer.

The one-star improvement to the Mustang’s original chronic two-star result is based purely on Ford’s decision to add NCAP-friendly safety kit to the spec sheet. Adult occupant safety has surely improved more than two per cent post-upgrades, and if not, what else must Ford have got wrong? Even the last Fiesta got 91 per cent in the AOP category, after all. Maybe Euro NCAP doesn’t have enough time, as it claims, but we’d still like to see a proper re-test of the car.

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Comments

Anonymous

And yet it will still get slammed by people for being a car that poses a very high threat to crowds… 😑

07/10/2017 - 16:03 |
74 | 2
CatHat

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

Crowd-Test!

07/10/2017 - 16:07 |
20 | 16
Anonymous

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

thats because it hits more pedestrians than any other car
a car against a human is a car against a human even if the car gets 100% and 5 stars safety rating

07/10/2017 - 16:10 |
8 | 38
Anonymous

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

Savage

07/10/2017 - 22:54 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

Camaro’s dont smash crowds…

09/27/2017 - 18:55 |
0 | 0
prizrak

I feel like pedestrian safety should be important in a Mustang :P (Full disclosure I drive a 2012 Mustang)

07/10/2017 - 16:10 |
6 | 2
Tomislav Celić

[DELETED]

07/10/2017 - 16:12 |
0 | 0
Daniel Busker

i just remember this damage from the vid of this last gen stang hitting a dodge ram at a relatively low speed (for this kind of damage) and since then i dont trust mustangs anymore lol

07/10/2017 - 16:36 |
16 | 0

But then again, a Dodge RAM rams through everything…

Sorry

07/10/2017 - 16:46 |
30 | 0
Itsuki

Surely people mad enough to buy Mustangs in Europe don’t really care all that much about being as safe as possible. You can see in crash footage it’s a strong car, the fact it doesn’t have a buzzer in the rear seats shouldn’t really turn anyone off getting one

07/10/2017 - 16:40 |
6 | 0
Jakob

The Euro-NCAP is rating every car equally and that’s absolutely correct. Quite frankly, the wall you just crashed into or the old woman you just ran over doesn’t care whether it was a sports car or a minivan or an IFV.

07/10/2017 - 17:00 |
16 | 2
Tomislav Celić

In reply to by Jakob

Yeah but I doubt an Arial Atom will see a pedestrian in it’s entire life. Or a 911 passengers in rear seats.

07/10/2017 - 17:18 |
2 | 2
Ben Anderson 1

In reply to by Jakob

Except the scores in all areas of the Mustang are pretty much identical to the Audi TT, but the Audi TT receives 4-stars because it has the option of extra electronic safety features. They don’t have to be standard. How is that fair? Some cars, like the Porsche Caymen, are not tested at all.

07/10/2017 - 21:26 |
10 | 2
Anonymous

mustang drivers be like :

07/10/2017 - 17:03 |
0 | 4
Bring a Caterham To MARS

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

That’s surprisingly accurate

07/10/2017 - 17:17 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

Other cars can get a better NCAP rating, why defend the Mustang for its woefully poor rear passenger protection. If they didn’t want people in the rear or bother to protect them then just remove the rear seats altogether.

07/10/2017 - 17:46 |
10 | 0
TheMindGarage

Why the heck does the performance on paper affect the crash test rating? It means zilch in real life. It should simply be based on how survivable a crash is with people in different situations (weighted according to the kind of car - as you said, few people ride in the back of a Mustang), not about what technology it uses to achieve that safety. That’d be like saying the Audi R8 is better than the Porsche 911 simply because it has four more cylinders.

07/10/2017 - 17:54 |
12 | 0

DiD i JuSt HeAr SoMeOnE tAlK aBoUt ThE aUdI r8???

07/11/2017 - 01:45 |
2 | 0
Zonda Man (Jdm squad)

Who even gives a sh!t about safety though? I personally dont.

07/10/2017 - 18:08 |
2 | 0
TheMindGarage

In reply to by Zonda Man (Jdm…

Crash safety isn’t as important as crash prevention which can be done through good driving practice. But sometimes crashes happen because someone else is an a-hole, so I’d rather be protected…

07/10/2017 - 18:40 |
6 | 0
Anonymous

In reply to by Zonda Man (Jdm…

It comes with age.

07/11/2017 - 07:21 |
4 | 0
AAA Insurance

In reply to by Zonda Man (Jdm…

I don’t either. The safety of your vehicle doesn’t equate to how safe you, or others will be. Look at the autobahn for example, they would be destroyed in most accidents, yet its way safer than US highways because of the drivers.

09/28/2017 - 02:09 |
0 | 0