The latest What Car? survey of in-market car buyers also reveals the most sought-after safety features and how many people don't consider safety important when choosing a car...
Almost half of new car buyers (49.5%) do not know the Euro NCAP safety rating of their car, while more than 10% aren’t aware of what a Euro NCAP safety rating is at all.
Those are two of the findings of the latest What Car? survey of in-market car buyers. However, 43.5% of respondents said they would not consider a car which achieved less than four stars out of five in Euro NCAP safety tests.
Surprisingly, 3.5% of people said they would be perfectly comfortable buying a zero-star car.
Of the respondents who were aware of Euro NCAP safety ratings, 13% said that the safety rating was not very important to them when considering a car purchase, with 29.4% thinking it very important.
We also asked which safety technologies respondents would want as standard in their next car, with more than half (53.3%) listing automatic headlights and 48.4% blind spot warnings.
Automatic emergency braking (AEB) was cited by 43.0%, and more than a third (34.8%) considered lane departure warnings important for their next car.
In 2020 Euro NCAP toughened up its safety tests, which consider a vehicle’s crash protection as well as its active safety systems, such as automatic emergency braking, lane keep assist and other features, for a combined rating.
Cars without active safety systems can score poorly in the latest format even if they perform well in crash testing.
Keyword: Nearly half of UK car buyers don’t know how safe their car is