ANCAP 2008 Ford Transit Crash Test
- Anthony Crawford
Heard of ANCAP? It stands for the Australasian New Car Assessment Program and provides potential car buyers with information on how much protection you can expect from your vehicle in the event of a serious front or side crash.
The overwhelming number of our fellow Australians who perish on our roads each and every year, remains alarming. That figure, more than 1600 is near enough to three times the number of Australian troops who died during the Vietnam War.
Worse still, most of these tragic deaths don?t even make it into the newspaper, as society has been largely desensitised due to the every day occurrence.
Moreover, the other number you don?t hear about, are those who are seriously injured in car crashes, roughly 10 times that of fatalities. So if we take the 2007 number above, its reasonable to suggest that 16,000 people are incapacitated in some way, and will most likely draw on the public health system. The cost to us all is staggering, not to mention the lifelong pain of losing a loved one.
While ANCAP doesn’t have anywhere near the size of budget it should have, it does have a serious passion for saving lives on our roads and lobbies both governments and carmakers for constant improvements in car safety devices such as curtain airbags and Electronic Stability Control (ESC) as it prefers to label the feature.
Take ESC or Electronic Stability Program (ESP) as some call it and German authorities say that this remarkable piece of electronic wizardry can eliminate up to 80 percent of all skidding crashes and thus, 35 percent of all fatalities.
It?s a similar story in safety conscious Sweden, where out of 500 road deaths each year, ESC can reduce fatalities by 80 to 100.
In the United States, with its enormous car population, up to 56 percent of all fatalities could be avoided with the fitment of ESC.
So why then doesn?t the Federal Government make ESC and curtain airbags mandatory on all new car sold in Australia?
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Tags: 2008, ANCAP, crash, Ford, test, transit
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