There was a time when a five-star safety rating was enough to sell a car; the whole marketing plan for the Renault Mégane II was apparently based around the fact that it was the first car of its type to achieve top honours. But as times have moved on and more and more cars are hitting top marks manufacturers are having to come up with different ways to attract attention.
Step forward U.S. car maker, Tesla. Its all-electric Model S has just been tested by the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and scored top marks in all five categories, a feat only matched by one per cent of all new cars tested in the States. While NHTSA's highest public rating is five stars, the Vehicle Safety Number it gives to manufacturers (why the yanks can't keep things simple is beyond me) can go higher, and Tesla says the Model S scored a 5.4. That's a better result than has ever been achieved in NHTSA testing of a passenger car, SUV or minivan (or 'MPV' if you're not American...).
So just how safe is the Tesla? Well the lack of an engine up front meant it fared very well in the frontal impact test with the void becoming a huge crumble zone while the location of the batteries in the floor meant that the Model S couldn't be rolled over "via the normal methods and special means were needed to induce the car to roll."
The biggest sign of the car's safety however is that when the NHTSA came to crush the roof - to simulate falling into a ravine or similar - the Model S passed the four-G mark before the machine administrating the test broke. Yeah, the machine designed specifically to crush cars broke before the car did - there's a meme somewhere for that.
The NHTSA test is oft criticised for being a little simplistic and has not moved beyond the 'crash car into hard object' test into the world of pedestrian and child occupant safety in the way Euro NCAP does, but we still suspect that somewhere in Sweden, a team of Volvo engineers are seething. Being able to claim that the V40 is the safest car ever tested by NCAP is one thing but forcing the NTHSA to come up with a new ranking and breaking a machine in the process is an entirely different level of PR.