The fault is pretty severe, it’s the wonky scoring which allows 4 stars, given NCAP had never seen a failure like this in over 28 years of crash testing. I’d not be keen on purchasing an MG3 without the issues being fixed. No car is perfect, but failures like this should really lead to a recall of affected vehicles rather than an “oh look, it may be an issue for you at some point” advisory.
Autocar wrote…
In Euro NCAP’s frontal offset crash test (in which 40% of the car’s front end collides with a barrier), it found the 3’s seat latching mechanism failed, causing the driver’s seat to twist during the impact. This caused a more severe impact on the crash test dummy’s right leg than if the seat had remained in place, resulting in a “poor” score for protection of the driver’s right femur. The organisation added that MG implemented changes to reinforce the mechanism in August.
Euro NCAP also found that the driver’s head could “bottom out” through the airbag in a crash, meaning it graded the 3’s head protection as only adequate. MG promised to tweak the airbag in October. However, the seat and airbag changes won’t be applied to 3s that have already been delivered to customers since the model’s launch last year.
Following the findings, Euro NCAP said it will implement changes to how it scores crash tests; it doesn’t currently have a mechanism for penalising cars in the event of component failures, so the 3 scored four stars out of five. “This is an almost unheard-of occurrence, but one that Euro NCAP will address through changes to our protocols and scoring so we can reflect any failure,” they said.
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