The new Ford Mustang is a very popular car with Autralian buyers — as well as being a beautiful car, it’s also the natural spiritual successor to Ford’s own outgoing Falcon, the tyre-shredding rear-wheel drive manual V8 that Australia grew to love over its four decades of history. The Mustang, though, has just had a mediocre two-star safety rating handed down to it by Australia’s crash testing body ANCAP.
CarAdvice has the low down on the crash results — while Mustang got a five-star rating for pedestrian safety and four stars for adult occupant protection, it fared less well with a three-star child occupant protection rating and only two stars for safety assist. That final factor was largely responsible for the car’s overall two-star rating in ANCAP’s tests.
ANCAP’s CEO James Goodwin said the Mustang’s result was “simply shocking for such a newly designed and popular model”. The car has been a runaway sales success since its initial announcement, with Ford securing extra production and still working to fill customer backlogs. “I would encourage Ford to swiftly introduce design and production changes to improve its safety performance,” Goodwin said.
Safety assist refers to a suite of technologies that can assist a driver in avoiding or mitigating a crash. The next version of the Mustang will have more active safety features than the current model, including automatic emergency braking and lane departure warnings.