EuroNCAP has awarded just two stars to the Ford Mustang after crash testing it, but before you deem it unsafe, or come up with yet another Kuga joke, bear in mind that the sports car did not perform as badly in the actual crash testing part of the equation as the rating implies.
As you’ll see below in EuroNCAP’s breakdown of the four scores that led to the two-star overall rating, the Mustang actually got a reasonable 72 percent for adult occupant protection, but it was the lower scores for child safety and pedestrian protection that dragged it down in the end.
While you could hardly say that the Mustang aced the frontal crash tests, its passenger compartment did remain stable and offered good leg protection, however of concern is that the car was penalised for having insufficient airbag pressure to prevent the occupants’ heads from hitting the steering wheel and dashboard.
The Mustang did score full points in the side barrier test by offering good protection to all critical body areas.
Somewhat less satisfactory was the Mustang’s 32 percent score for child safety and while the crash tests actually showed reasonable good protection in the frontal impact, the car lost all points for the 10-year-old-mimicking dummy because the head hit the C-pillar trim through the side curtain airbag.
Pedestrian protection proved reasonable at 64 percent, but the other area where the Mustang lost big points was in the Safety Assist category, where it got just 16 percent due to its lack of standard active safety features. However, Ford did state that its facelifted Mustang will feature Pre-Collision Assist and Lane Keep Assist as standard in the European market and those features could boost its score.
So is the score misleading?
Still, and bearing in mind that this car is clearly not as safe as it should be, we can’t help but consider the overall two-star rating to be a bit on the misleading side. Let’s put it like this: if you know how to drive and you don’t have kids, then you’re surely somewhat safer than EuroNCAP’s rating implies. But you might just want to beef up those airbags Ford.