Orion to be five-star car?

Ford Australia has stopped short of confirming its new Falcon will be Australia's first locally-built five-star car. Though Blue Oval insiders privately admit the car should score a much-vaunted five star rating when it is tested by ANCAP, officially the company is playing down the importance of the third-party crash test endorsement.

Ford Australia boss Tom Gorman refused to confirm the car, codenamed Orion, would be a five-star car.

"What's important is we give great consumer safety on the vehicle. We know that we are going to produce an incredibly safe car that is going to be real world safe," Gorman told the Carsales Network this week.

"I think the ANCAP five-star stuff is getting more visibility in the [Australian] marketplace. Whether we leverage that or nor leverage that, we will just have to wait and see as we approach the launch," he said.

"What we're going to continue to talk about is real-world safety. That's the thing that's singly most important to us."

Increasingly, published crash ratings are featuring in the consideration set of buyers -- both private and corporate. To date, the players in the Australian large car segment have steered clear of prominently marketing crash safety ratings. None of the current locally built cars are five-star cars.

Says Gorman: "Third party endorsements in Europe and North American are very powerful. This market hasn't evolved to that level yet."

Gorman conceded, however, it was important that the new Orion out rated the existing large car product: "Absolutely. Any metric is important -- to be able to say you've done the best in that class or you've improved it, or you're competitive.

"When we develop a vehicle, we think about our [vehicle] attributes and we decide where do we want to be: do we want to be competitive, [or] have a leadership position. [With Orion] I think we can be in a very good position from a safety story."

Not counting Mitsubishi's 380 in the consideration set, the Ford boss said: "The other two vehicles [Commodore and Aurion] are both four-star vehicles -- we're pretty familiar where they are. We're pretty confident we're going to be in good shape," he said.

From next year ANCAP will only award five stars to cars with stability control as standard. Ford's current Falcon gets a four star rating and offers stability control on most models, including all autos. Commodore and Aurion include stability control. The 380 does not offer stability control even as an option.

Holden and Toyota have previously been critical of ANCAP's crash rating regime. As consumer confidence and credence in the crash ratings grows, however, the move by Ford to court a five-star rating for the new Falcon will likely bring pressure to bear on the rival manufacturers.

Ford's European-sourced small and medium cars (Focus and the recently launched Mondeo) both earn five stars under EuroNCAP testing.

Gaining a five-star rating would give Ford a worthwhile marketing fillip. It is unlikely Holden nor Toyota would be able to respond until they materially update their models -- at least two years away.

Holden is nonetheless understood to be re-engineering aspects of its Commodore structure -- in particular the oft criticised A-pillars (more here). Though the main motivator is understood to be reducing driver blindspots, the maker could derive some crash rating benefits as part of the update.

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