New market arrivals, GWM Ora and Alfa Romeo Tonale, score five star safety ratings

ANCAP SAFETY, Australia and New Zealand’s independent voice on vehicle safety, has released five star safety ratings for the new GWM Ora and Alfa Romeo Tonale. A five star safety rating has also been earned by the Citroen C5 X, which entered the Australian market last year.

The Peugeot 308 and BMW i4 have recorded four star ANCAP safety ratings, falling short of scoring thresholds required to achieve the top star rating.

Arriving onto Australian and New Zealand shores this month, the all-electric GWM Ora and the Alfa Romeo Tonale bring with them five star safety ratings following testing conducted by ANCAP’s European counterpart, Euro NCAP, last year. Both the Ora and Tonale performed well in all four key areas of assessment, offering good all-round performance for the protection of adult and child occupants and vulnerable road users, and for their ability to actively avoid a crash through standard-fit collision avoidance systems.

“Solid performance across the board makes the GWM Ora the only battery-electric powered car in the Small Car segment to hold a five star ANCAP safety rating against the 2020-2022 test criteria,” said ANCAP Chief Executive Officer, Carla Hoorweg.

“The five star rating for the Alfa Romeo Tonale hybrid sees it added to a growing list of Small SUVs with strong and green safety credentials,” Ms Hoorweg added.

The Citroen C5 X also achieved the top ANCAP safety rating of five stars – one star rating level higher than the four star C5 X sold in Europe – owing to a more advanced autonomous emergency braking (AEB) system fitted to Australian-supplied vehicles. A camera-radar ‘fusion’ AEB system is fitted as standard to C5 X vehicles supplied in Australia, and this system was shown to provide improved car-to-car AEB performance over the camera-only system fitted to vehicles sold in Europe.

“The improved active safety specification and performance sees the Safety Assist score for Australian-sold C5 X vehicles rise to 84% which is well within our requirements for five stars.”

As with the Citroen C5 X, Safety Assist performance is of an improved standard on the Australian-specified Peugeot 308 when compared to the standard European variant. Unfortunately, lower scores in the Adult Occupant Protection assessment of the Peugeot 308 result in an overall rating that is limited to four stars.

“It is good to see Stellantis opting to provide their Australian customers with a system that provides an enhanced level of active safety performance,” said Ms Hoorweg.

A four star safety rating also carries through from European testing to battery-electric BMW i4 vehicles sold in Australia and New Zealand. BMW advised ANCAP that the AEB and lane support systems fitted to locally-specified vehicles is of a higher standard than the systems tested in Europe, yet BMW did not put the vehicle forward to ANCAP for verification testing to confirm performance of these systems.

Full details on the safety performance of the GWM Ora, Alfa Romeo Tonale, Citroen C5 X, Peugeot 308 and BMW i4 can be viewed here.