Chery re-enters the Australian market with improved safety

ANCAP SAFETY, Australia and New Zealand’s independent voice on vehicle safety, has today released a five star safety rating for the Chery Omoda 5 – some 12 years after the last ANCAP safety rating for a Chery model was released.

Elevating its safety offering well above that of its predecessors, and to more stringent test and rating criteria, the Chery Omoda 5 offers sound levels of structural and active safety protection. Previous offerings - the Chery J11 (2 stars) and Chery J1 (3 stars) - achieved ANCAP safety ratings well below the expected standard when rated back in 2011.

Assessed against 2020-2022 rating criteria, structural performance of the Omoda 5 in the frontal offset (MPDB) crash test was sound, with a mix of Good and Adequate performance achieved. Concerns were noted however for the design of the dashboard, 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 additional risk.

In the side impact test, injury measurements recorded by the test dummy for key body regions were Good, however during this test, 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 both the frontal offset test and oblique pole tests to Adequate.

The front-end design of the Omoda 5 was shown to be effective in minimising the injury risk to occupants of an oncoming vehicle, if struck, with only a very slight deduction applied in this area of testing – one of the best scores recorded for vehicle-to-vehicle ‘compatibility’ seen to date.

In assessment of the Omoda 5’s active safety systems, autonomous emergency braking (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 the 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 any potential differences in safety-related vehicle performance. The additional tests, conducted locally, showed vehicles with the updated software maintained a similar level of performance to the test results obtained in initial European testing, though the local vehicle did not respond in a small number of emergency lane keeping test scenarios and this is reflected in a reduced score for ELK. The overall Safety Assist score remains within the five-star threshold.

“This five-star ANCAP safety rating for the Omoda 5 is a marked improvement on the results seen by Chery’s original market entrants a decade ago,” said ANCAP Chief Executive Officer, Carla Hoorweg.

“Chery has made significant strides to reach the five-star standard and we encourage them to continue to refine and improve the performance of their vehicles with future new models and model updates,” Ms Hoorweg said.

This rating applies to 1.5 litre petrol variants sold in Australia.

Full details on the safety performance of the Chery Omoda 5 are available here.