Light Truck Safety

Light trucks are an important market segment – frequenting our roads as they undertake their role of transporting goods to consumers and delivering materials to service trades.

The COVID-19 pandemic further amplified their use with a significant increase on the home delivery of groceries and other online purchases.

To assist business operators and private consumers make informed purchasing decisions, and to shine an inaugural light on safety performance across the light truck segment, we examined some of Australia’s top-selling light trucks.

Insights from this assessment set the benchmark for future safety improvements.

This inaugural assessment differs to the traditional star rating approach applied to passenger cars. For light trucks, our focus is on active safety (collision avoidance) features where we examine the fitment and performance of low and high-speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB), lane support systems (LSS), speed assistance systems (SAS) and occupant detection systems.

And, taking into account the potential weight of goods being transported, our performance tests have been undertaken with each truck laden to 50% of their goods carrying capacity (payload).

ANCAP acknowledges the light trucks tested in this project were compliant with the minimum regulatory Australian Design Rule (ADR) requirements for safety in Australia. ANCAP also acknowledges that several safety features in addition to the regulatory minimum requirements of the ADRs were available on the trucks tested. These features did not form part of ANCAP testing.