The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) has been around for nearly 30 years. Since its first evaluation in 1997, it’s tested hundreds of cars through crash tests and pedestrian safety evaluations. But the organization says it’s never come across a problem like this.
Euro NCAP recently did a full sweep of tests on the MG 3, a Chinese-built small hatchback. The routine involved five full-scale crash tests: a 50-percent front-overlap crash, a full-width frontal impact, a side impact crash, a pole test, and a whiplash test. During that first test, Euro NCAP says the MG suffered a seat latch-related failure that caused the crash test dummy to experience more forces on its right side than expected.
Specifically, the right side of the seat rail latch became loose in the impact, says Euro NCAP. Here’s what it had to say:
During the frontal offset crash test, Euro NCAP’s engineers found that the driver’s seat latching mechanism failed. Such a seat adjuster failure has not been seen before in Euro NCAP testing, which has assessed hundreds of passenger vehicles since it began work in 1997.
The failure of the latching mechanism caused the driver’s seat to twist partway through the impact. This movement led to elevated forces on the dummy’s right leg, with protection for that body region assessed as ‘poor’. The seat failure also meant that MG could not demonstrate how well the car would protect the knees and femurs of occupants of different sizes or those seated in varying positions.
Having a seat that’s properly attached to the rest of the car is a pretty low bar. Still, it’s not totally unheard of. Just two years ago, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) discovered the 2024 Kia Carnival’s rear seats could detach during a side impact crash. Kia quickly fixed the problem with stronger mounting points (though ironically, the updated car still earned a “Poor” rating from the IIHS because the safety cell didn’t hold up well).
Euro NCAP says MG initially tried to point the blame in the testing firm’s direction, but according to the organization, it checked the latches before sending the car to its final destination.
Euro NCAP shared its findings with MG, which initially argued that the failure was due to improper latching of the seat before the test. However, as is standard procedure, the seat’s latching had been checked before testing was conducted. MG has subsequently committed to improving the design of the seat latch mechanism to ensure it remains robust in the event of an impact.
In addition to the seat problem, Euro NCAP also found that the dummy’s head “bottomed out” the front airbag, making contact with the steering wheel. That lowered the car’s head protection to “adequate.” MG told Euro NCAP it plans to make changes to the latch and the airbag for vehicles built going forward, though strangely, it doesn’t plan to add these updates to existing cars already in the hands of customers. The company did not immediately respond when reached for comment by The Autopian. If I get a response, I’ll be sure to update this article.
Here’s the weird part: Despite the seat latch failure and the weak airbag leading to an increased risk of injury, the MG 3 still received four out of five stars from Euro NCAP as a result of these tests. How’s that possible? Thankfully, the testers themselves realize the results are a bit ridiculous:
Despite the seriousness of the issue, which raises questions about how well the 3 can protect its driver in the event of an impact, Euro NCAP’s scoring system does not currently allow for a deduction or override in the case of such a component failure. As a result, the MG 3 still qualifies for four stars, thanks to its performance in other areas.
[…]
While Euro NCAP’s current assessment protocols are designed to reward consistent, all-round protection, this case illustrates a rare gap in the scoring framework. Despite the highly unusual failure of a critical safety component, the car’s relatively strong performance in other areas allowed it to retain a four-star overall rating.
Euro NCAP will review this aspect of its protocols, particularly considering manufacturers choosing not to rectify or improve failed safety elements.
The MG 3’s results are just proof that even after 28 years of crashing cars into objects, there are still blind spots in crash testing that pop up from time to time. Instead of simply sticking to its rules and burying its head in the sand, Euro NCAP is being rational about all of this and taking a hard look in the mirror.
On its surface, a 4/5 rating means a car is fairly safe—the Euro-market BMW 1 Series received the same rating just recently. Except that car’s seats stayed in place during a crash. With some surface-level research, the average buyer probably wouldn’t know the difference. So clearly, the tests need some adjustment. Let’s hope it happens sooner rather than later.
This is what happens when committees dictate everything, as opposed to using common sense.
Chinese cars? Not even once.
Bad enough nearly everything else in your house is made there, I sure as fuck will not drive a Chinesium car. And using parts from there is a hell of a difference from driving a Chinese designed, Chinese engineered & Chinese built car. Nope. Nope.
I’ve gotten a couple MG rentals in Italy on work trips, and I have hated all of them. Seriously one of the most gutless, terrible new cars I’ve driven over there. I still have a photo on my phone of the inside of the fuel filler cover. It says “Utilizzare solo benzina sensa piombo” (use only fuel without lead), and then in English it says “Unleashed fuel only”. UNLEASHED. So that made it into production somehow.
Anyways, I hope to never get another MG. Thank you.
Seems kind of silly that they missed the small details (the malfunctioning seat latch caused the airbag to bottom out) when they already did all the hard work of making the vehicle structure hold up well.
One of the reasons this may have happened is that C-NCAP appears to be woefully underfunded and can’t test the hundreds of new car models released every year (though many of them are refreshes and model year updates that don’t need retesting); their website shows about 20-30 models a year. They buy the vehicles with their own money at random dealers without the manufacturer’s knowledge, and they seem to at least try to test popular models when possible. C-IASI, China’s IIHS equivalent, tests 40-50 models a year but also can’t keep up. This means that a lot of cars built and sold in China (including foreign brands) don’t actually get officially crash tested, especially random MGs that don’t sell well in the country (SAIC’s non-JV brand cars sell pretty terribly in China).
Man! The MG logo looks hilariously wrong on that car.
I don’t see why people get worked up about “Safety” and “Stars”. Just don’t crash and it’ll never be a problem. Next you’ll be telling me that sunglasses and flip-flops (with nothing in between) aren’t sufficient gear for riding a motorcycle.
(Sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious.)
1. I find it strange the car would be marketed before NCAP results were available.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-NCAP is at the moment stricter than E-NCAP I think, see table in link.
3. NCAP ‘stars’ are IMO very simplistic, even misleading when comparing models. Fex my MY2008 car lost a star because in a couple of EU markets it could optionally be had without ESP or side and curtain airbags, so no side impact test.
#1 – Euro NCAP isn’t a European Union agency or anything official, it’s a non-profit that conducts its own testing.
The European Union and/or member states have norms and regulations for new vehicles though, and I am pretty sure “seats shouldn’t fly through the windshield” is one of them. Some regulators might look into MG and make them recall faulty vehicles.
Yes, but all ‘non-motorhead’ people I meet, rate cars in order: How nice is the inside plastic, how many safety stars does it have and does it come in grey? No NCAP rating in the sales material is like no pictures.
Sometimes I hop on Chinese Carvana and check out the brand new “pre-owned” cars that get dumped there by automakers trying to pump up their numbers. There’s your usual flood of BYDs and GM-Wulings, then there’s the dirt cheap no-frills MGs. A manual MG5 for 6000USD, and when I say manual I mean manual gearbox, manual seats, manual AC, pretty much the only automatic things are the power windows and FM seeker.
I’d think what a refreshing experience this would be, no distractions no screens no AI assistants, then I’d think of safety and stuff like this, and the dream pretty much dies 🙁
You could check C-NCAP and C-IASI to see if any of those models have been tested (but many are not).
The bumper sticker industry will have to update their offerings “MG Airbags, we die like real men!”
Rated MG for Manly Gore.
This is the sort of thing that worries me most about some of the ultra-cheap Chinese cars, and especially EVs (although I know this is an ICE car), that are being widely touted as the future by much of the press. So many of these cars are not able to meet NCAP or IIHS type testing in the Chinese market, and undergo heavy redesigns to hit the minimum required targets when they go on sale in Europe.
It was only a matter of time before one of these baked in shortcuts was uncovered in a crash test. I recognize that MG is not BYD and all the companies are independent, but all of these companies are in a desperate race to the bottom on price, and all have razor thin margins. These sorts of glaring safety shortcuts are the norm in these cars, rather than the exception. Just look at Chinese crash tests of the BYD Dolphin, compared to the Euro NCAP tests, the cars are far from identical, and the car is heavily reworked to be made safe enough, but you have to wonder what baked in compromises remain.
In China, cars under 4 meters in length are not subject to the normal C-NCAP regulations and instead fall under the Microcar category which has lax safety standards, kind of like how Japan has Kei cars. European carmakers have been begging the EU to implement a similar kind of small car safety cutout which they claim will allow them to sell small cars for cheap again.
In China, most of these microcars are very slow, can barely go 100km/h, don’t have the range to go at highway speeds anyways, and are generally bought as secondary cars to go run errands around town in. There are no speed or power caps to stop BYD from making a 200hp version of the Dolphin, but those barely sell over the standard 90hp version because people just want something cheap in this segment.
“Euro NCAP’s scoring system does not currently allow for a deduction or override in the case of such a component failure.”
Anybody else find that weird? Almost like saying “We crash tested the car, and the dashboard suddenly transformed into a jousting lance and impaled the dummy through the head, but that’s not specified in our testing parameters so it gets four stars. Just maybe note that this may happen if you buy this car. Not our fault. By the numbers it’s totally safe.”
I would bet it was intentional, given they had never seen any failures of this kind, and as a way to avoid allowing anyone to deduct points on something that isn’t experimentally driven. Like someone saying “oh well the G-forces and deformation say 5 stars, but I think it looks worse, so 4.” But that’s mostly a guess driven by the fact that Euro NCAP is a big organization, so every bit of scoring was probably worked over by a dozen committees and written in the most inflexible language possible.
This MG that was involved in the incident at NCAP this week…
Yeah, the one the front fell off?
Yeah
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
Well, how is it un-typical?
Well there are a lot of these cars driving around the continent all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen. I just don’t want people thinking that cars aren’t safe.
Was this car safe?
Well, I was thinking more about the other ones.
“In addition to the seat problem, Euro NCAP also found that the dummy’s head “bottomed out” the front airbag, making contact with the steering wheel.”
That seems almost more concerning to me? Is this a common thing? Did they say what the force of the impact was?
Like, we know how to make airbags, we’ve been making them for 40 years now, how are they messing that up?
My guess is it did that because of the seat problem, since it would have allowed the torso more movement than it was designed for. That said, it’s a hugely concerning thing to see.
Over 50 years, GM had them in the ’70s, and the early ones actually worked great
General Motors introduced the first production vehicle equipped with an airbag, the 1974 Chevrolet Malibu, as an option. The 1984 Chrysler Cordoba became the first mass-produced car to feature driver-side airbags as standard.
It was the Impala and the other full size cars that offered the air bags in 1974 as a regular option, though a very limited run of 1973 Toronados had them. Mercedes was the first automaker to offer them after that in 1980.
The Cordoba was discontinued after the 1983 model year and it wasn’t until 1988 that Chrysler installed its first air bags.
The Impala never had them as a regular option, a pilot run of 1973 Impalas was built with airbags as a proof of concept, and the system then became a regular option on full size 1974 Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Cadillacs (including the Toronado and Eldorado).
The ’73 Impala pilot cars did have modified Toronado dashboards to accommodate the passenger side module
You are correct, the Impala was a limited run of 1000 1973s while the 1974 Buick, Olds and Cadillac were regular production options.
Here is one of those Impalas https://cars.bonhams.com/auction/17320/lot/234/the-first-production-car-to-feature-air-bag-technology-possibly-the-last-example-remaining1973-chevrolet-impala-v8-4-door-sedan-chassis-no-il69k3d800823/#photos
An incredibly well preserved example, which apparently included a spare ACRS system. Air Cushion Restraint System sounds so much better than Air Bag. Just like ASB, Anti Skid Braking is a much better descriptor than the term that caught on ABS.
The weird thing is, that it was completely brand new, leading edge technology, that actually worked basically perfectly right out of the box and proved to be highly reliable and durable in real world use. Usually, GM releases half-baked ideas too early, lets their customers be the beta testers, and belatedly fixes problems only after bad publicity, but in this case, they actually worked everything out in advance and released a fully developed product
Yeah, not only did they work right out of the box they were durable systems too, sometime in the 90’s when Air Bags were becoming standard equipment in many cars the IIHS found a long dormant example. They got it working good enough to crash and the system worked just as designed. ~20 years later.
It was actually the full size models from Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. Chevy only had a small number of airbag equipped Impalas buikt for 1973 as a test run for fleet customers, but not as a regular option. The midsize models didn’t get them at all
Airbags have two jobs: prevent contact with the steering wheel/dashboard, and reducing loads on the occupant’s spine by spreading the load away from the seatbelt, especially when it comes to the head. The latter is actually somewhat more crucial than the former thanks to collapsing steering columns and dashboards, and relies on the airbag’s compliance to gently capture the momentum without causing undue brain damage.
Airbags are part of the reason why factory restraints are actually safer than 4-6 point harnesses for road use, as the 3-point belt has enough compliance to let the airbag catch the occupant’s head, while a 5-point harness keeps the torso completely stationary, leaving the neck to deal with the entirety of the head’s momentum. Racing harnesses are safer than a lap belt or a 3-point belt with no airbag, since many older systems simply don’t restrain the upper body, letting the occupants’ skulls cannonball into the dashboard, but now, they decrease the safety of the vehicle unless paired with a HANS device, which necessitates a helmet. That’s why you see many cars with a harness and a standard 3-point seatbelt, because they’re each safer under different conditions.
Back on topic, the ideal outcome for an airbag is to almost bottom out. If it’s so rigid that the occupant’s head stops at full inflation, it might as well be a brick thrown at their head. Of course, impacts at different speeds would be optimally dealt with by different levels of compliance, so if China does their crash testing a little slower, an airbag optimized for that speed would bottom out in a higher-speed test. Of course, that means if you crash even faster than the test, you’re toast.
All this to say, it is definitely concerning, but likely done on purpose to optimize results under a different testing standard.
Maybe one of those 4 stars should be an asterisk.
Caution: do not collide with an Obelix.
That’s a proper Idee fixe!
Pre-2009, Euro NCAP actually had a rating where one of the stars is flagged/struck through for “unacceptable high risk of life-threatening injury”. Several cars fell foul of this, including the Chevrolet Aveo
https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/8704/euroncap_chevrolet_aveo_2006_2stars_strikethrough.pdf
The worst one though was the Nissan Navara pickup, which was rated one star that was struck through, meaning it technically got zero stars.
https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/8860/euroncap_nissan_navara_2008_1star_strikethrough.pdf
Sounds like the Brian Butterfield International Hotel rating system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKlKzYPtkQ0