That's a relative thing. Look at what they score badly on.
https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/features/opinion/tom-wiltshire/dacia-jogger-euro-ncap/
Safety scores aren’t a typical Dacia strong point, and when we sat in the product presentation being told about the Jogger’s trim levels, I’m not sure anyone expected it to do well in safety testing. But giving it a one-star rating suggests that this is an inherently unsafe car, and not something you want to cram seven members of your family into. Right?
Well, maybe not. The fact is that while a simple five-star scale should be as consumer-friendly as it gets, it actually requires some decoding to be fair to both car manufacturers and buyers.
So, the Dacia actually scored 70 per cent (the equivalent of four stars) in adult occupant protection and 69 per cent (three stars) in child occupant protection – the two areas of the NCAP test that actually focus on the car’s performance in a crash.
Why Euro NCAP is skewing crash test scores
These aren’t stellar scores, but they’re acceptable – compared with the older, used family cars that rival this car’s sub-£15k price tag, the Jogger holds its own in an impact. Gone are the days when cheap cars folded up like deckchairs in a crash.
The scores are also at odds with Euro NCAP’s own scoring scale, stating that a one-star verdict means cars offer ‘marginal crash protection.’ What’s marginal about four stars in adult protection?
Why is the score so low? Well, to keep such a cheap price tag, Dacia doesn’t fit its cars with the very latest active safety equipment – it doesn’t think its customers want to pay extra for them. The Jogger’s autonomous emergency braking only detects other cars, not cyclists or pedestrians, and it doesn’t have lane-keeping assist on any model. It also lost points because the third-row seats don’t have any seatbelt warnings.
This gave it just 41 per cent, or two stars for vulnerable road users and 39 per cent, or one star, in the safety assist category.
And since Euro NCAP’s overall rating can only go as high as the lowest score from any of the four categories, it’s one star for the Dacia Jogger.
Look, I don’t own a car newer than 1994 but even I can see some active safety systems make sense. Autonomous emergency braking acknowledges and makes allowances for the fact we can’t concentrate everywhere, all the time – and though lane-keeping aids can be colossally irritating they’re probably useful if sudden narcolepsy has you drifting out of lane 3 on the M4.
But it’s disingenuous to suggest that not having systems like these fitted makes a car unsafe in a crash – or even that it makes the car more likely to crash in the first place.
Are electronic gizmos actually making modern cars safer?
Ask any CAR road tester and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about lane-keeping aids steering them towards oncoming traffic, or adaptive speed assist systems that slam the anchors on while they’re doing 70mph on the motorway. Unlike ABS or ESP, these systems are constantly interfering and often feel as though they need significantly more development outside of a laboratory and on real roads. Most people I’ve spoken to just turn them off at the start of every journey.
I have to say, there's a real point here. I have assisted stop turned off on my picanto after it malfunctioned on the motorway and it turns out it can be triggered by radio signals (after seeking advice from mechanic, dealership and looking it up the spot it happened to me as a problem with triggering these systems so it's not a fault with the car itself so to speak).
I also have the airbag disabled due to my height and how close I sit to the steering wheel after it became apparent that women under 5'3" are at risk of greater injury from the airbag than a crash because of how they work.
So I do read the safety ratings, but I don't take the score at face value. I actually look at what they say and what the car is and isn't good for.
The fact is Dacia's statically are less likely to be in an accident in the first place. There may be some debate over whether that's the type of driver who buys a Dacia, the car itself or a combination of the two (if you don't have the acceleration you drive differently to a car with more power for starters).
It's a bloody easy thing to criticise Dacia's for to say they are dangerous but the 'evidence' for that isn't quite what it seems.