ANCAP, the Australasian car safety assessment organization, has picked a 30-year-old Mitsubishi Magna saloon for an unusual crash test that warranted no accolades from the test crew. The standards have surely risen in these three decades!
ANCAP was founded in 1993, and the Magna was among its very first test vehicles. However, the standards were still comparatively lax in the nineties, so the company decided to celebrate its 30th birthday by seeing how well the car would fare in a much stricter modern crash test. Long story short: not well at all.
According to the experts, the driver runs a severe risk of injuring legs and fracturing pelvic bones, but only as long as the near-lethal cranial impact doesn’t kill them first. Despite wearing a seat belt, the test mannequin slammed headfirst into the steering wheel with at least twice the force of the average modern car. The mannequin in the back row put on an even more compelling show by sliding down under the belt, winding up with severe abdomen injuries (simulated, thank goodness).
Back in the 1990s, the Magna was a popular and fairly affordable vehicle. It mostly relied on seat belts for safety and had no airbags – not even as a paid option.
As you must have realized by now, the test did a really solid job highlighting the drastic improvement of both the vehicle safety standards and the crash test routines over the past few decades. Back in 1993, the company only ran a single head-on collision test with the car, and did so at a much lower acceleration.
The first round of safety assessments conducted by the ANCAP shortly after it was founded encompassed nine popular cars of the early nineties. These included a Ford Falcon, a Holden Commodore, a Honda Accord, a Toyota Camry and a Volvo 940. Suffice it to say, the Volvo was the only one on the list to even have an airbag installed.
