Lane assist, adaptive cruise control and auto-park are all really useful where I live... well they would be if we had some straight roads (adaptive cruise needs to see the car in front) with white lines (Lane assist confusingly doesn't work on "real" lanes), and kerbs lining the roads (park assist fails miserably unless there is a kerb, or at least a significant grass verge).
Not entirely sure of the benefits of auto-braking on rural lanes either, even if the car is being driven really badly by a complete knob with no driving skills - I'd be surprised if it can react to avoid deer who behave in unexpected ways, e.g. sometimes overtaking a car in their urge to get hit by it.
(I'll just sit and wait to get flamed by someone who doesn't get irony now...)

NCAP want us all to drive curry wurst cars....well so it seems...
Fiat looks like they dying out

We have had strange breaking incidents here due to brake "assist" interventions.....
I know a guy who has a BMW, it thought it saw something and started to break for no reason on a country road.....the whole family hanging in their seatbelts.....

After that little incident he turned that dratted thing off....

Anyways....what will the future bring??
Not gonna buy any German car ever...we had our share of VW...never ever again...and Audi...do not get me started:bang:

I also get a hard time over my 2011 GP....why do you drive that pile of .... well it always works and is fun on its own terms...plus I like the simplicity of it....
Todays benchmarks is having as many gizmos as possible...

TL;DR: the new test takes mostly moot points and applies them to the argument nobody is making in the first place (taking a 7 year old car and applying new, inapplicable standards to a use-case that rarely exists).

Semantically speaking, the Panda is no less safe than it was when it was first produced and tested since the vehicle hasn't changed. What has changed is what is considered 'safe'.

The emphasis on electronic driving aids is a double edged sword, because it's actually a numbers game. If auto emergency braking, for example, reduces the probability of an accident (which it statistically does), it is deemed worth the effort of implementing. This, in turn, introduces an element of reliance on that technology (in other words a reduction in driving attentiveness) which may or may not have been a factor in the probable accident in the first place. The fact that we can't know for sure means that it's mathematically sound to have such technology. As a counterexample of a similar situation, even the most attentive driver doing 5 below the inner city speed limit won't be able to account for dumb little children with no concept of mass, force, stopping distance etc. who's parents have not yet instilled a fear for life by properly teaching pedestrian safety. These kids (who are usually just around visible height from a driving position) will dash out from in between parked cars at any point in the road without looking anywhere and no amount of driving prowess, attention or auto emergency city braking can do anything about that impact. That's where pedestrian safety standards come into play, because as much as we love our children, they're little bags of meat and bones just like us, but with less awareness and little to no notion of consequence. This is usually the thinking behind pedestrian safety standards, and the statistics to justify it are actually more about drivers failing to yield to pedestrian right-of-way points such as junctions and crossings (so the math tells us it's usually the drivers doing the hitting rather than the pedestrians doing the walking in front of cars).

Lastly, as many on the forum know, fitting a child seat to the rear of the Panda is a faff. Fitting a pram into the boot is also a faff, especially as prams and baby carriages and seats get larger (ironically also usually for safety). If you've ever tried to fold and fit a newer model of a baby carriage into the boot of the Panda, then tried to use the carriage section to move the child into the back seat using the isoFix mounts, you'll know that two things happen: First, the damn thing either won't or will barely fit into the boot leaving no room for the baby bag, which you have to move to the rear seat (which is an accident hazard as it's unsecured cargo). Then you spend a good half minute with the door open trying to secure the seat to the mounts, during which the child gets irritated and starts complaining. This results in the inability to make any swift progress with a child, as setting off in the first place becomes an ordeal. This situation is not unique to the Panda, and is a common issue on many small city cars, which is why they are called 'small city car' and not 'family car' or some other nomenclature that would indicate otherwise. In turn, one of the first things who own city cars do when they have a child is to get a bigger vehicle. By the time the child is 7-10 years old (the age at which the dummies in the test represent), most people who haven't moved to a larger vehicle have felt the need to do so for some time as not only has the little human grown in size, but so has the size of and amount of things they tend to require (such as the introduction of backpacks, sports equipment, school projects, multiple friends of various denominations of length and girth). Sure, living with a Panda with offspring is 'doable', just as wearing shoes a half size too small is 'doable'. The Panda will do it all, just not as good as it could (or should), and the shoe will still protect your feet but at the end of the day you'll wonder whether it was worth the cost.

So, as you can probably deduce, the electronics and pedestrian emphasis on the test is as much political and legislative as it is awkward. In the United States, the rising belt line on newer vehicles (for side impact safety, ironically) and the introduction of rollover testing has resulted in vehicles you simply can't see out the back of, which resulted in children getting run over by their parents as they back out of the garage or driveway. Someone showed some politicians a few numbers, and now all new cars sold in America are required to have a back up camera from 2019 onward. Basically, a solution to a problem that was created by a solution to another problem has been driven by skewed mathematics and a poor understanding of systems design/process management. I won't be surprised if electronic aids become legally required around the world in the near future, and even if they currently aren't, the public perception created by the aforementioned skewed statistics means that manufacturers will have to follow suit whether they are legally required to or not. The other key area in which the Panda has been deemed 'less safe than before' is a point with little real-world consequence to most Panda owners, unless they enjoy the torture of using a small city car as a people-mover, in which case they would be no better off in pretty much any other city car for the most part.

The bit in the Thatcham research commentary video on the result where the supposedly independent guy says 'don't buy a Panda, buy a second-hand Ibiza' is a bit depressing. An Ibiza is a much bigger car anyway, it's hardly a fair comparison.

Still remember Euro N Cap buying the woman's Saab after she hit an Elk at some speed and survived. Am sure they'd condemn a similar car now but I wouldn't call it unsafe. Things move on.

That recommendation to buy a second hand Ibiza is about as relevant as a tech journalist telling people to buy second hand Windows computers with newer components rather than the (now renewed but previously abysmally outdated) MacBook Air or Mac Mini. In a similar vein, why buy a second hand Ibiza when you can have a new i10 for the same money? Why buy a new Fiat 500 when you can have a 10 year old Mercedes S Class for the same money? What's the point of any such comparison?

Reminds me of this:

Couldn't agree more with all the comments above - but what really grates for me is that this sort of comedy headline simply convinces the dim and timid to buy more near 3-tonne Ego Panzer's in which to take the kids to school. Just what the world today needs....

Goudrons said:

Maybe the City Brake option might become standard on higher end trim

Click to expand...

I'm one of the few with this. Its greatest asset is blocking the sun 'tween the sun-blind gap.

Pulling onto a busy roundabout in Sheffield 'merging' into the traffic, as there's never a gap, you're inevitably close to the vehicle already on the roundabout (but not that close). What you do NOT want is for the brakes to suddenly jam on, whilst you brick it, wondering for a second what in the most holy kiss of chocolate just happened."I thought I'd disabled that".

In the end it'll make no difference to sales. These days, today's news would give its most precious organs to be even close to being tomorrow's chip-paper.

Ohh look........another tweet about someone who said something......

I drive our Vitara with city brake around the most congested city in the country and it's no bother.

I also think some might condemn it without the first idea how it works.

It doesn't just slam the brakes on willy-nilly, it detects you closing in and if you haven't responded to the decreasing gap (started to brake, decelerate or move the car/sensor out of the way) it sounds/flashes a warning and pre loads the brakes ready for an emergency stop.

If you still fail to respond to that, it will then apply the brakes for you.

If you're a numpty and drive badly you'll hear/see it warning you all the time.
Drive like a idiot and ignore the warnings then it will slam the brakes on.

Drive normally, react as you should to traffic around you and you'll see/hear nothing and it won't touch the brakes unless something suddenly gets in your way that you have no chance of reacting to yourself.

Just think of it like an airbag, no one plans on using it for real, but if it comes to it, you're glad you have it and the chances of it's use are greater if you drive like a d*ckhead.



The bonus of this system on the Vitara is it uses the same system for cruise control.
Set the cruise and select the distance to the car in front (three settings), if the car in front slows so do you. Someone pulling into the gap in front and it brakes and maintains the gap.
Traffic suddenly comes to a stop and it's braking before you can even think about hitting the brakes yourself.
In fact when you leave the motorway and turn it off it's quite eerie, you feel a bit exposed.


Just imagine if every car involved in this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-23970047
had one or both features, I doubt they'd be a story to link to.

Goudrons said:

I also think some might condemn it without the first idea how it works.

Click to expand...

I remember exactly the same comments from people years ago when ABS was becoming a regular feature of everyday mainstream cars.

"i don't need no computer braking for me, I know exactly what i'm doing" or my personal favorite from someone I worked with in the 90's
"if it weren't for the ABS I wouldn't have crashed"

Now we don't think anything at all about ABS, fitted by law to all new cars for the last decade its just there and we never notice it.

In another 10 years all these features available now will be standard everyday things we don't give a second thought to.

As I've said in the other thread in the leisure lounge, the safest car is one that doesn't crash in the first place.

You can't really expect manufacturers to keep making cars stronger and stronger and dissipate the energy through the same mass. There comes a point that cars become either too big or too heavy to be practical.

All there electronics in cars is no different to whats going on in the computer world. You can't infinately make processors smaller and smaller so you just build in more cores to the computer's CPU.

Cars can't get stronger and stronger forever so you make them safe by other means, avoiding the crash in the first place or minimising the effects of the crash. So that the same car in the same crash but fitted with the electronics will be safer as it has slowed its self down earlier or taken some other evasive action to reduce the risk of harm.

No structually the Panda is no different from the car it was when it was launched in 2011, however all the other cars on the road have changed and are safer, have a crash with another newer car and the panda is not going to fair anywhere near as well as it would have done with another 2011 car.

I should also add, you could be the best driver in the world and lets face it there are not many people who don't think they are. but no matter how good a driver you are, it only takes one idiot on a bad day to crash into you and your family, I would rather that idiot was in a car that was able to stop it's self and override that driver's stupidity than rely solely on the strength and safety systems of my own car to protect me.

Again TL;DR: my issue isn't with the lack of safety features on the Panda, statistics indicate that they will make the world safer. My issue is with skewed testing, reporting, and the eventual consequences.

As I've said above, the hard numbers indicate the electronics play a role in the reduction of accidents. As such, I'm confident they will eventually become mandated and they too will evolve into better systems. The issue most people have isn't with the systems themselves, but with the perception and sway of public opinion by the weighting and publicity of the NCAP tests. Media sensationalizing aside, the scoring of the test is far from indicative of what one would call an objective assessment. The categories are weighted in a manner that seems more politically motivated than practically or scientifically. The fact that a base spec Panda was tested at all seems to contradict the very name of the institution (NCAP stands for 'New Car Assessment Program - the Panda is hardly a new car). Now, I understand the baseline for what we consider safe has to move forward, as that in and of itself is progress, but it's pointless to taunt Michael Duane Johnson for being slow because he can't keep up with Usain Bolt in a sprint today. It seems, however, that the standard threshold has moved far enough that there is no longer room for the middle ground (namely, 'affordable' or 'value') between 'downright cheap' (such as the current crop of Chinesium alloy brands with the chassis rigidity of a cardboard box) and 'premium' (such as the up! or to a lesser degree the i10) in the small car segment. The misrepresentation of this category of vehicles such as this test is what I take issue with the most, as it will likely remove any incentive for manufacturers to even bother with the 'value' end of the segment, leaving the market to adjust itself to either saving up for a more expensive vehicle with many elements they don't really need/want, or making do with the other end of the spectrum and actually facing (and possibly inflicting) true danger of life and limb unto themselves or others. If they follow this test up with a re-test of the Dacia Sandero (which would probably fare similarly), the image of affordable yet value minded motoring will probably be tarnished beyond repair, relegating such affordable yet 'good enough' vehicles to the Asian, South American, African and Eastern European markets.

Lack of gizmos would prevent a 4 or 5 star. The zero rating is due to the readings taken from the crash test dummies. They are tremendous pieces of complex engineering originally designed using volunteers and cadavers. The results won't have been manipulated. I was most concerned by the high readings around the chest and neck. If you watch the video the head movements are incredible and they fly about.
However, the structure of the vehicle was fine. I find it very difficult to believe the seat design is that bad in comparison to others. What is clear is how much the car bounced to the side greatly influenced how the dummies were thrown about.
In the Panda you have a good elevation all round so can better see and avoid hazard. Look at the i30 results, a 5 star car, and watch the video. Your range of view could be a few tens of metres less in busy traffic. The car did not bounce, so the dummies were better off, and it has all the Gizmos. A real crash would have all sorts of dynamics, If an i30 and Panda collided I would sit in either.

/Rant=On

The main safety responsibility remains with the driver in all circumstances and drivers have to fully acknowledge that. Technology is certaining driving down standards on the road and if as much effort was put into improving driver training as goes into Construction & Use legislation, the world would be a better place. Sure NCAP allows people to make informed decisions about which car they mighty like to buy, but it’s not the only thing that keeps their kids safe.

Driving is all about Risk v’s Reward and I for one won’t be selling my Morgan 3-Wheeler anytime soon, just because it would probably have scored -15* on NCAP....

/Rant=Off

Just looked at the videos and the results on the website.

The biggest concern I spotted was in the overlap test where the drivers head whips back from the airbag, and makes very hard and heavy contact with the B-pillar of the door.

My guess is that N-cap when assessing these tests, look at the impact to the side or front of the head and any hit from the rear is not distinguished from the headrest.

As such the result show good protection to the head (green), but having watched that Video, if that dummy was a person they would have a very serious, maybe even fatal head injury.

In the full front on test the airbag nearly takes the dummy's head off and the top of the head makes contact with the head rest, again this would be a very serious neck injury, but the results appear to show good front passenger neck protection??

There are clearly some floors in the way the results are interpreted.

For anyone interested in how the Euro NCAP algorithm works, this table explains, including 2016 v 2018 tests. I have another table somewhere which shows what measures contribute to the scores.



Read across the table and the lowest matching % score gives the car's rating. So to get a 5 star rating, the car needs to score AOP>80%, COP>80%, PP>60% and SA>70%.

The Panda scored 0 stars on the basis of child occupancy and safety assistance. By way of comparison, the Jeep Wrangler only scored 1 star because of a lack of safety assistance features.

Found it!

R1NGA said:

/Rant=On

The main safety responsibility remains with the driver in all circumstances and drivers have to fully acknowledge that. Technology is certaining driving down standards on the road and if as much effort was put into improving driver training as goes into Construction & Use legislation, the world would be a better place. Sure NCAP allows people to make informed decisions about which car they mighty like to buy, but it’s not the only thing that keeps their kids safe.

Driving is all about Risk v’s Reward and I for one won’t be selling my Morgan 3-Wheeler anytime soon, just because it would probably have scored -15* on NCAP....

/Rant=Off

Click to expand...

There's no doubt this would work, to an extent and I for one support it.

But, there's an endless list of accident causes and they are not all down to bad driving.

We're already had the deer in the road scenario and as far as I know, they don't hold driving licenses and not because they always seem to fail the test.

Improving the standard of the driver encountering these would perhaps help in some cases, but even the best are human and they are known to make some bad decisions from time to time, particularly under stress.

We've also a lot of unlicensed and untested road users these days and many are involved in accidents with cars and lorries that aren't the car drivers fault.

I know of someone recently that was involved in a horrific accident and lost a leg.
Needless to say he was well aware that he shouldn't have tried to make a third lane in between two lorries at a set of lights, but he was never trained or tested before he used the road.
The investigation team after the accident were pretty confident if either lorry was fitted with a blind spot detection system, he would have likely fared better.

Fitting active and passive safety devices to every car would not only help mitigate accidents like this, but also those of human failure, whether idiotic or not.

It's debatable if a system like city brake lowers the driving standard.
It could be argued that with the warning that it produces alerting the driver that they might not be driving safely it is actually improving driver response in it's self.
Same goes for speed warning systems, they'll active, flash and buzz when you break the speed limit, you might say they are pretty effective training devices and much better than telling someone something that they then choose to ignore or forget.

The thing though is reliance on electronic systems that can fail.
A garage owner friend told be of an obscure failure that is now being examined by the manufacturer, he was not allowed to tell me the make or model of the car but I can tell you what happened. The driver had to hit the brakes and the plastic brake pedal snapped, it didn't have a mechanical hand brake and then crashed into a parked van. As my mate said two major issues with primary safety. Another one I was told about two days ago was my daughter's partner and his 2018 Honda civic, the parking sensors go haywire when it's raining so he had disabled them only to reverse into a concrete bollard as it wasn't visible due to no lighting where he parked and it being below the line of mirrors. Technology is no good if it doesn't work properly but also should not be relied on either. What about the number of reported accidents when air bags haven't deployed? A trip to the scrap yard can be very revealing.

R1NGA said:

/Rant=On

The main safety responsibility remains with the driver in all circumstances and drivers have to fully acknowledge that. Technology is certaining driving down standards on the road and if as much effort was put into improving driver training as goes into Construction & Use legislation, the world would be a better place. Sure NCAP allows people to make informed decisions about which car they mighty like to buy, but it’s not the only thing that keeps their kids safe.

Driving is all about Risk v’s Reward and I for one won’t be selling my Morgan 3-Wheeler anytime soon, just because it would probably have scored -15* on NCAP....

/Rant=Off

Click to expand...

Decent rant.

Like the sound of the Moggie.

I wonder if putting the driver out in the front in a transparent, and flimsy, plastic bubble would make people rethink their driving priorities.

To be honest, I don't care about the electronic stuff. And yeah, it's true it's the drivers responsibility to drive safe and avoid a crash in the first place.. but really, I don't care about that on this particular topic either.

I'm legitimately more concerned about how well the Panda stacks up against other city cars. OF course larger, more expensive and heavier cars will fare better on it....

But the VW Up and Hyundai i10, Celerio etc..... Barring the driver himself, and the electronics... is there any evidence to suggest they have dramatically improved structure, absorb much more shock and that the dummies (us) inside them are exposed to less deadly stopping of momentum?

It gets harder everyday to justify wanting a new Panda. But I still do. I struggle to see why it was randomly re-tested and other city cars aren't. The VW Up also came out in 2011, will it be retested?

Going to go and make my own judgements now by watching the crash tests of the aforementioned vehicles... I want a small car, but I want to be safe too.

We live in a generation where everything is so incredibly one-sided on the media. I accept Fiat don't help themselves in many ways as a company, and I'd love to trust Euro NCAP how I should be able to as a consumer, but them and crushing Fiat as well as the news jumping on the band wagon to make the Panda out to be a glorified shopping trolley (but in a BAD way!) doesn't necessarily strike me as comprehensive, reasonable and entirely honest to be frank..

Just sent this to Euro NCAP... will be interesting to see if they reply and with what...