As one of Australia’s most affordable small cars and with a model history here dating back decades, the Suzuki Swift is often seen as an ideal first car, when purchased new or second-hand.

But parents eyeing the current fourth-generation Swift may have pause for thought, following the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP SAFETY) awarding the model a lowly one out of five stars for its safety performance.

The fourth-generation Suzuki Swift entered the Australian and New Zealand markets earlier this year without an ANCAP rating but with the same model having earlier been awarded a three-star Euro NCAP rating.

It was expected the Australian-delivered Swift would emulate this performance, although Suzuki advised at the time of the new model’s launch that the safety specifications of Australian-delivered vehicles differed to those sold in Europe.

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Additional testing subsequently undertaken by ANCAP to assess the performance of Australian and New Zealand models has led to the safety body highlighting areas of concern with the Swift’s physical crash protection performance, resulting in a one-star safety rating.

“Earlier this year ANCAP was informed of physical differences between locally supplied Swift models and those supplied in Europe so we conducted a range of additional crash tests on local vehicles and found some areas of concern,” ANCAP Chief Executive Officer, Carla Hoorweg.

“In comparison to the three-star rating achieved by Swift vehicles sold in Europe, vehicles sold in Australia and New Zealand performed differently when crash tested,” said.

A score of 47% was achieved for Adult Occupant Protection and 59% scored for Child Occupant Protection. The Swift’s collision avoidance performance was also described as limited, with a score of 54% recorded in the Safety Assist assessment pillar.

ANCAP also reported performance variation in the frontal offset and full-width crash tests, with higher chest loads and leg injury risk to the driver in the frontal offset test and a significantly greater rear passenger chest compression measurement recorded in the full-width test which exceeded allowable limits.

“The design of some of the structural elements and restraints in locally sold Swift vehicles appear to lack robustness leading to variation in crash performance,” Ms Hoorweg said.

Poor scores were also recorded for the head and chest of the child dummies in the head-on and side-impact crash test scenarios, with ANCAP stating the Child Occupant Protection result of 59% is one of the lowest scores seen to date.

The Suzuki Swift is the latest model to record different safety scores to its European counterpart and follows ANCAP recently announcing safety-related differences between the locally tested Honda Civic, CR-V and ZR-V, and their European counterparts.

This is despite ANCAP and Euro NCAP aligning their test and rating criteria in 2018 to promote consistency across markets.

“This one-star result serves as an important reminder for prospective buyers to check the ANCAP safety rating of the vehicle they’re looking to buy,” Ms Hoorweg said.

Other models tested by ANCAP that recorded much better results were the Toyota LandCruiser Prado and Kia EV5, both of which achieved five-star ratings against the latest test criteria.

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