The Australasian New Car Assessment Program, better known as ANCAP, has today released the results of another crash test that appears to serve very little purpose given it involves a four-year-old model that the taxpayer-funded association already knew wouldn’t achieve its highest rating.
Estimated to have cost around $750,000, the test has resulted in ANCAP slapping Hyundai’s best-selling model globally, the i30 Sedan (known elsewhere as the Elantra and Avante), with a three-star safety rating.
This was essentially a test of a vehicle that first came out in 2020 against 2024 standards, which were unknown at the time of the vehicle’s design and production.
After its release in 2020, the Hyundai i30 Sedan received a Top Safety Pick rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in the United States and a five-star crash rating from South Korea’s ANCAP equivalent; the vehicle isn’t sold in Europe, so Euro NCAP never tested it.
According to ANCAP CEO Carla Hoorweg, the Hyundai i30 Sedan was tested now because “the addition of the hybrid powertrain this year broadens consumer interest”.
However, the hybrid and internal combustion engine variants of the i30 Sedan are almost technically identical as far as a crash test goes, by ANCAP’s own admission.
The three-star rating doesn’t apply to the i30 Sedan N, which remains unrated along with petrol versions built before June 2023.
ANCAP has given the i30 Sedan an adult occupant protection score of 71 per cent, a child occupant protection score of 81 per cent, a vulnerable road user protection score of 62 per cent, and a safety assist score of 56 per cent.
Interestingly, ANCAP hasn’t decided to apply its own logic of testing other now-popular hybrids to modern standards, such as the Toyota Corolla Hybrid.
Toyota’s model significantly outsells the Hyundai i30 Sedan hybrid, and was given a five-star rating following testing in 2018 – which is set to expire in just over a month, due to ANCAP’s six-year expiry date policy.
Despite the organisation’s general irrelevance in our market – due to far broader and more comprehensive testing in Europe, Asia and North America – many Australian fleet managers are mandated only to purchase vehicles with five-star ANCAP ratings.
It’s a position that numerous fleet organisations in the industry have told us is untenable long-term.
But is the Hyundai i30 sedan actually unsafe?
ANCAP now views any vehicle that doesn’t meet its stringent criteria of constant beeping as potentially dangerous. According to the company’s own press release: “the performance of Safety Assist limited the i30 Sedan to three-stars”.
In other words, it doesn’t beep enough when you’re driving.
Reading ANCAP’s actual crash test results shows that the Hyundai i30 protects its occupants rather well in an actual crash, with scores of 7.37 out of 8 for the adult side impact test, 5.13 points out of 6 for the adult dynamic test and 15.46 out of 16 for the child dynamic test.
With its latest publicity stunt, ANCAP is seemingly trying to show that Hyundai should have updated a vehicle that came out in 2020 to 2024 standards just for the Australian market.
To put that in context, figures from Hyundai’s annual sales report show that roughly 275,000 examples of the i30 Sedan/Elantra/Avante were sold globally in 2023 – of which only around 3000 came to Australia last year.
Given that other markets had already given the i30 Sedan a top score when it was first released – and tested it to the standards it was designed for – ANCAP’s latest crash test seems like another massive waste of taxpayer funds with no net benefit to Australian consumers.
