EuroNCAP, the European New Car Assessment Program have released their findings on the crashworthiness of the Nissan Navara SUV/Pickup.
The Navara’s passenger compartment became unstable in the impact and would have been unable to withstand greater loading. The chassis rail collapsed on the impacted side, allowing a significant level of intrusion into the driver’s footwell…
As tested, the vehicle performed incredibly badly, scoring just 1 star out of 5 and even this star was struck through due to an unacceptably high risk of head injury to front-seat occupants. In the frontal-impact test video which demonstrates the vehicle hitting an offset deformable barrier. Even to the untrained eye, the entire structure seems weak, easily deforming in areas intrusive to the passenger compartment. To add further injury, the seatbelt pretensioners and airbags fire late, in one instance it appears the passenger’s head almost completely misses the airbag.
The Nissan Navara is a ‘luxury’ pickup that you are more likely to see badly parked on a kerb outside a primary school than on rugged off-road terrain so it would seem important that the Navara can withstand normal crashes. On the subject of the school-run, the Navara does get a 3 out of 5 rating for a child occupant in an isofix seat in the rear of the passenger cabin. The cynic in me, however, wonders if that child might become an orphan in the event of a crash in the Navaro. I’ve always had the impression that this sort of vehicle is bought by parents as sort of an ‘armoured personnel carrier’ for their kids to make up for the shortcoming in their own driving ability. In the case of the Navara, this could be an unfortunate mistake.
Nissan are apparently modifying the production Navaras to eliminate the faulty airbag deployment and pretensioners. However, with the passenger compartment becoming unstable at 40mph and being ‘unable to withstand greater loading’, it’s difficult to see how the Navara could make significant improvement in a retest.
I’m not sure whether the older ‘4 star’ ratings are directly transposable to the 5-star ratings but if they are, the Rover Metro/100 actually achieves a higher score than the Navara Pick-Up at 1 complete star out of 4.
According to a BBC clip on the issue, some are calling for the Navara to be recalled. While I would agree that a recall may be justified to fix the airbag issues, there probably isn’t much that can be done for the overall cabin structure after the vehicle has left the assembly line (or perhaps even the drawing board).
Note: The EuroNCAP article refers to a Nissan Navaro in the title but references a test on a Navara. I believe the tested vehicle is the Navara - I’m not sure where ‘Navaro’ comes from, whether it’s a variant or import - perhaps just a typo, if anyone knows, please tell me in the comments section below. References in this article are now changed to Navara.
Tags: 1 star, airbag, crash test, dangerous, euroncap, nissan navara, nissan navaro
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