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Comment by sparkpeasy | Hacker News Reader

How do these do in a crash test?

We get a fair few of them (edit: Great Walls, not this new model) in Australia, and they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype. Sure they're cheap, but this seems to very much be a "you get what you pay for" cheap, not a "great bang for buck" cheap.

Personally I've only been in 1, one of the newer utes, and it felt like a 15 yr old base-model rental, despite being brand new and spec'd out.

Few examples of previous models bombing their testing:

> The budget Great Wall Steed ute has scored a shocking two stars in the latest round of ANCAP crash testing, against the 2016 ratings criteria.

https://www.caradvice.com.au/545184/great-wall-steed-flunks-...

> Chinese Haval H9 SUV slammed in world first independent crash test, conducted in Australia

> [...]sales of Chinese vehicles have almost come to standstill in Australia after safety recalls of Great Wall Motors utes due to asbestos components and poor crash test ratings of earlier models in recent years.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/motoring/chine...

> they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype

If I remember my history correctly, this used to be true of Japanese exports too (and Taiwanese, and Korean, et al). Hopefully the Chinese will improve with time, and start to be known for high-quality exports!

I've ridden a Chinese electric taxi in Guangzhou. it was fine. If you want to walk away from a high speed crash I'd chose something else. If you stick under 60km/h which is what an awful lot of urban driving is, in traffic, I think you'd survive.

A 1960s mini minor, or a fiat 500 or even a fiat panda or a Citroen 2cv would be as dangerous. And yet, entirely street legal.

Tbf, Fiat Panda has recently been downgraded to 1 out of 5 stars in European safety tests, due to the fact that the most advanced safety feature it has is a beeper if you don't put your seatbelt on. So while still legal, hopefully the dire safety rating should put at least some buyers off.

Static seatbelts. God.. what a pain they were. I liked the first panda, it felt a lot like a 2cv or a mini. I suspect it would be hard to get real insurance now, for the obvious reasons. Mind you.. the Dutch canta.. now there's a deathtrap and more than a few of them on th streets of Amsterdam

Wikipedia says that the Panda gets 4/5 for the 2012 version - -the latest apparently.

As always, Wikipedia is outdated. And I was wrong too - Fiat Panda was awarded no stars recently, the worst possible score: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fleetnews.co.uk/amp/news/ma...

You have to be careful when interpreting 'safety feature'. It does of course have airbags and SIPS but NCAP is now considering driver-assistance equipment as part of the assessment. So they moved the goalposts and retested the same Panda.

And as a result year's NCAP 'stars' signify something different to previous model years, so a zero rating in 2018 might still be better than four stars in 2014. That is important when comparing against second-hand models.

Personally I think that NCAP should just rate on actual impact protection measures and provide additional, supplemtary ratings for other features.

Euro NCAP will be mostly “nope”. It’s not that the Chinese can’t build decent cars (Qoros 3 got 5 stars) but definitely not at that price point.

Also no dealer, service or parts supply here in Europe so no thanks. Stick with my Citroen.

They'll crash just fine.

It's not the fall, it's the hard stop at the ending that gets ya.

The top speed is only 100kmh or so, so it's probably subject to some special rules

100kmh is plenty fast enough to have a major accident.

There are lot of fatal crashes in cities as well, because going 30 while getting hit frontally by a speedster at 60 is still releasing 90dv of energy and that scales quadratically with speed

No one knows

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