Chery makes ‘significant’ strides
ANCAP has awarded five stars to Chery’s Omoda 5. It comes some 12 years after its last safety rating for a model by the marque was released.
Elevating its safety offering “well above” that of its predecessors, and to more stringent test and rating criteria, the car offers “sound levels of structural and active safety protection”.
“Previous offerings – the Chery J11 (two stars) and J1 (three stars) – achieved well below the expected standard when rated back in 2011,” says ANCAP.
Assessed against 2020-22 criteria, the structural performance of the Omoda 5 in the frontal-offset crash test was sound with a mix of good and adequate performance achieved.
Concerns were noted, however, for the dashboard’s design where hard elements beneath could become a potential source of knee-injury risk to occupants of different sizes to that of the driver and front-passenger test dummies. Penalties were applied to reflect this.
In the side-impact test, injury measurements recorded by the test dummy for key body regions were good. However, the head-protecting side curtain airbag did not open as intended and a penalty was applied – reducing the score for the driver’s head in the frontal-offset test and oblique-pole tests to adequate.
The Omoda 5’s front-end design was effective in minimising injury risk to occupants of an oncoming vehicle if struck with only a slight deduction applied – one of the best scores recorded for vehicle-to-vehicle “compatibility” seen to date.
The car’s AEB performance was good with functionality extending to detect and respond to other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, and in reversing and intersection-turning scenarios.
Following an update to lane-support software running in Australian-supplied vehicles from April 2023, additional emergency-lane keeping (ELK) and lane-keep assist (LKA) tests were conducted to assess potential differences in safety performance.
The extra tests, conducted locally, showed vehicles with the updated software maintained a similar level of performance to test results obtained in initial European testing, although the local vehicle didn’t respond in a small number of emergency lane-keeping test scenarios and this was reflected in a reduced ELK score. The overall safety-assist score remained within the five-star threshold.
“This five-star rating for the Omoda 5 is a marked improvement on results seen by Chery’s original market entrants a decade ago,” said Carla Hoorweg, ANCAP’s chief executive officer.
“Chery has made significant strides to reach the five-star standard. We encourage them to continue to refine and improve the performance of their vehicles with future new models and model updates.”
This rating applies to 1.5-litre petrol variants sold across the Tasman.
