After the ‘Landwind’ disaster another Chinese-made car was due for a crash test and failed bitterly, 1 out of 5 stars.
Brief summary:
The cabin is too soft and deforms easily. Pedals and dashboard intruded deep into the cabin and the door sill folded so that heavy machinery would be needed to open the door and extract the driver. The airbag showed to be useless in an offset frontal crash as the steering wheel column shifted and the head of the dummy slipped past the airbag and hit the steering wheel. The car doesn have seatbelt load limiters. No survival is expected in a side-impact collision.
Article (in German). Click on the picture in the top right corner to see more (pictures 16 to 18 show the Landwind) or the video boxes (Brilliance and Landwind crash tests).
A new report says that Brilliance has taken note of the test result and will re-design the cabin and provide a prototype for another crash test. And they claim they will exchange the 350 cars that have already been sold, though it doesn’t seem to stop them from wanting to sell the other 150 that they have already imported.
There is also some controversy about a statement made by Brilliance where they claim that they are co-operating with the ADAC (who performs the test) to improve the car. However the ADAC denies there is any such arrangement.
And my Dad was sooo happy that now in Central America the Chinese are exporting these cars, selling them in the most prominent venues. “Wow, they are only 20 thousand USD, half the cost of a Toyota Four Runner!”, he said breathlessly. Couldn’t convince him that if he got in an accident in one of those things, as a friend from Shanghai, who has seen actual accidents in those, put it, “the car ends up like a used Kleenex and you’re what’s left spread inside”.
In my first week in Shanghai I saw a Maserati which had just rear-ended a Ferrari on the Yan An Gao Jia just as you come down for Tibet Road. Hilarious. Obviously both occupants were fine as these cars are extremely safe. But what a thing to see!
Even the VW Santanas on sale here are death traps. Safety is not really an issue in China, as you’d expect. Life is cheap.
It seems that Brilliance are now preparing to increase their production capacity by a factor of five, based on the equipment they are procuring right now. They are also looking to further cut costs. Yes, as cheap and nasty as the cars are now, they want to make them even cheaper still.
[quote=“Lord Lucan”]In my first week in Shanghai I saw a Maserati which had just rear-ended a Ferrari on the Yan An Gao Jia just as you come down for Tibet Road. Hilarious. Obviously both occupants were fine as these cars are extremely safe. But what a thing to see!
Even the VW Santanas on sale here are death traps. Safety is not really an issue in China, as you’d expect. Life is cheap.[/quote]
And I thought it couldn’t get any better than the 3-way taxi smash I saw a few months back in Taipei. They all got out and stood looking at each other with a ‘does not compute…’ look on their faces.
