SAFETY CHECK
Dual-cab ute safety is somewhat of a chicken or the egg question, albeit one that’s not without outside influences. The chicken or the egg question is this: did dual-cab utes become the best-selling vehicles on Australian roads because they have increasingly offered the safety of conventional passenger cars or did their popularity, especially as family transport, mean that manufacturers needed to offer more and more safety kit to maintain their competitive advantage?
The outside influences include the federal government mandating of electronic stability control (ESC) on light commercial vehicles from the end of 2017 and demands for five-star Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) ratings for occupational health and safety (OH&S) reasons from industry and the like. You need to remember that the dual-cab you see as your ‘family car’ is still classified as a light commercial vehicle by the government, and in lower-spec variants is used in work roles.
The upshot of all this is that all of the popular dual-cabs sold today have so much more safety kit than dual cabs of 10 years ago that they are barely comparable.
More interestingly, there’s considerable disparity in the amount of safety kit fitted to the popular dual cabs sold today despite all of them, plus the Chinese-made LDV T60, achieving a five-star ANCAP safety rating (see ‘ANCAP safety ratings’).
Some safety kit such as anti-lock brakes (ABS) and ESC is of course universal, while advanced safety features such as autonomous emergency braking (AEB) are only just finding their way into dual cabs. And there are other, more inherent design features, such as full-time 4x4 that contribute to safety but aren’t often recognised as safety features.
All safety features either help prevent an accident occurring in the first
