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Damian James' Blog: 17 November 2008 - Van NCAP
Date: 17 November 2008
It is welcome news to see that Euro NCAP has recently announced that without ESC you can't achieve five stars.
I can see that soon there will be a need for six stars as cars get increasingly more safety features installed as standard. This is all good news but I have two concerns.
Why is the UK so low down the list of ESC being fitted as standard? Only around half of new cars made for the UK market have the safety system incorporated straight from the factory.
The real hope is that following the introduction of the new stricter testing methods in January 2009 this will increase dramatically. Perhaps at the same time manufacturers will also start to call ESC the same name as currently the plethora of different abbreviations is confusing for most consumers.
My other concern is that the van market is getting left behind in this safety drive. It wasn't so long ago that you had to specify a driver's airbag as it wasn't standard.
Thankfully this situation has changed. Now there are some manufacturers that are installing ESC but there is still no way for buyers to compare the safety of vans.
Why can't Euro NCAP have crash testing on vans as they do with cars? Perhaps van drivers are seen as less important but as a fleet manager who runs vans why should they be treated differently to my car drivers?
