Hyundai Palisade facelift shoots for five stars in August

ANCAP gave Hyundai’s 8-seat Palisade SUV a 4-star rating under false pretences. But on the verge of an update, why spend on a soon-to-be-redundant crash test? The answer will make you mad…

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In this report, you will see exactly what a taxpayer-funded, self-serving political smear actually looks like. You paid about three-quarters of a million dollars for this, so get ready to be disappointed - or downright furious.

For context, you need to see my recent report on ANCAP’s disgraceful conduct rating the Hyundai Palisade four stars. This report is a follow-up, because some important and possibly more depressing new information has just come to light.

The short version: The LX2 Palisade is a 2018 design. ANCAP tested it recently, according to the latest and strictest protocols for 2020-2022, and published the rating of four stars. Problem is the Palisade is four years older than the testing protocols to which it was subjected. It has been crash tested ‘Back to the Future’ style.

There’s no engineering question that, had Palisade been tested in 2019, five stars would have been the determination.

However, Hyundai has since issued, under embargo, details of the mid-life model update for Palisade, in the form of a seven-page Preliminary Product Guide. (An embargo is simply an agreement not to reveal information before a certain date. It’s a trust thing. Probably also a contract.) The embargo has lifted, obviously.

In ANCAP’s official statement, following the four-star announcement four days ago, CEO Carla Hoorweg disingenuously (I would argue) begged Hyundai to upgrade the vehicle to five stars.

That’s a direct quote from the full ANCAP statement, which you can read here >>

Once again, ANCAP is leveraging the entirely false equivalence of five stars. This business about ‘bringing the Palisade to equal footing with its competitors’ is just nonsense. It seems to be a clear reference to the five-star rating of most of the rest of this segment.

Biggest seller in the segment: Toyota Prado (11,400 sales so far this year, V Palisade, on about 1800). Prado was awarded five stars way back in 2011 and has not been assessed by ANCAP since. If it were to be tested today, against current criteria, it would be very lucky to limp away with two stars. I am not exaggerating.

So, I call on ANCAP to retract that absurdly facile statement in the interest of actually being a provider of ‘clear, reliable and independent consumer information’ on safety. Because clearly, Palisade is substantially safer than Prado. By 8 years, mind you.

What’s outrageous here is the deeply flawed rating system, not Palisade’s performance within it.

There is no “equal footing” to which Palisade might aspire, regarding the likes of Prado or Pathfinder (both rated five stars in 2011). Palisade is already ahead of, and far safer than, those, by a mile.

Even a politician could understand, based on this handy ANCAP graphic, that five stars is less safe, the further back in time you go. There is no equivalence or ‘equal footing’. 

This evolution is also explained here: Five stars is so different today that it requires three pages just to detail the bullet points of the differences. 

2011 might as well have been the crash-testing Jurassic. Prado and Pathfinder are dinosaurs.

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Old and busted...

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new hotness.

What a pity ANCAP does not take its own advice on datestamps in the public statements it makes on this. The engineering teams in-house must roll their eyes when they read this ‘equal footing’ and similar facile bullshit. (Personal opinion.)

According to the Hyundai Preliminary Product Guide for Palisade, the upgrade goes on sale in August. That’s two months away.

So, ANCAP spent $750,000 - they receive taxpayer funding; it was your cash they spent - and they made a determination on a vehicle, of which only about 300 get sold every month, and that rating will be current for only the next eight weeks.

Does that seem like a good investment to you?

Right there, in the middle. See it? $750K (average) to get Palisade’s rating completely botched… Can you smell that?

Palisade failed to get five stars because it just missed out (by one percentage point) on so-called ‘adult occupant protection’.

Next-generation Palisade will feature the centre airbag and the multi-collision braking system that the predecessor lacked, and this will certainly achieve more than that which is required for five stars in the adult occupant protection domain.

Palisade also failed to achieve five stars under ANCAP in the domain of so-called ‘safety assist’. It needed 70 per cent there, and got 63.

ANCAP gets pretty heavy on the jargon, but you get the point. 

According to the Preliminary Product Guide on the August upgrade, in addition to the centre (anti-headbutt) airbag, Palisade will get Reverse Parking Collision Avoidance Assist, Intelligent Speed Limit Assist, Forward Collision Avoidance Assist, and Junction Turning Assist. 

These features are included because they are clearly designed to achieve five stars today. Just think like an engineering company for a moment. You release a car in 2018; you design it for five stars in 2018. You plan a mid-life makeover for 2022, and you know the roadmap to achieve five-stars at that time - so you plan those features for the upgrade. How else would you do it?

It’s part of the upgrade, it gives you a story to tell - Safer, sexier, more fruit. That’s how this works. The planning and the integration of these complex safety systems takes many months.

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POLITICAL GRANDSTANDING IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST

So here’s a few things to consider before letting the bullshitters bang on about it:

Firstly, Hyundai could not have adapted Palisade to five stars in August if it had not planned those revisions extensively - some from the ground up, and some integrated over the past several months. The goal here appears always to have been to field a five-star platform, for the life of the vehicle, according to the criteria which pertained at the time of launch/upgrade.

Secondly, this could not possibly be a response to ANCAP’s bullshit call for safety revisions - you can’t integrate a centre airbag and multi-collision braking system over the weekend. It just doesn’t work that way - this isn’t Mighty Car Mods.

But don’t be surprised if you hear some bullshit narrative from ANCAP to the effect that this upgrade to five stars is a response to them calling for it, down the track. They could not have dragged this upgrade out of any car company in that little time, if it had not been planned all along.

Is ANCAP using Palisade’s four-star rating to leverage the new government for funding?

The big question is: Why spend the $750k on a rating that would expire eight weeks after it was announced, when they knew the upgrade was imminent? Why not just pick up the phone, sign a big fat NDA and do actual consumers a favour by spending efficiently and testing the model that will be on sale for the next four years? Much better value, don’t you think?

Now, it may be that some of the testing needs not be re-done, to re-rate Palisade. They will certainly have to go again with much of the Safety Assist testing, and there might be another couple of hundred thousand there. But they might get away with including the centre airbag in the absence of a physical crash. Hyundai would have data for that. I guess ANCAP propeller-heads could validate it.

Point is - this seems to me to be either spectacularly incompetent, or depressingly political. Like, it would be dead easy to spin the hell out of this in Lobbyland (Canberra), when ANCAP gets its hand out and begs for further fat stacks of your taxpayer cash, from the newly sworn-in government.

You can imagine a spin doctor claiming to some moderately ignorant politician or bureaucrat: ‘See here? Palisade was a four-star shitbox. We named and shamed it. They immediately upgraded it because of us. This is taxpayer money well spent - we’re saving lives on Aussie roads. Please can we have some more?’  

I do wonder if that’s the motivation.

It’s a struggle to see a dimension to this behaviour outside the domains of incompetence and/or politics. Forced to guess which, it’s hard not place a bet on abject political shitfuckery. Balance of probability and historical precedence suggest this is probably right.

Unfortunately, the loser in all of this is clearly you, the consumer, because you paid for this stupidity.

IIHS testing uses a bigger, heavier mobile test rig, so Palisade’s rating here is worth more salt - effectively.

To ANCAP broadly, they need to understand this: You are doing the public a gross disservice every time you imply expediently that all five-star ratings are equivalent. They simply are not. It’s on your own goddamn website.

This matters because lives are at stake, and ANCAP appears to think it has some credibility in this area to leverage.

I probably know more about crash testing than most people. And I cannot think of a crash that I would rather have in an OLD Prado or Pathfinder (rating from 2011) versus a four-star Palisade from 2022, or a five-star Palisade from 2023. 

This implied, entirely false equivalence of five stars irrespective of the date is made not once, but twice, in ANCAP’s disgraceful Palisade release.

Also of note, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States has seen fit to award Palisade the Coveted Top Safety Pick+ award for both 2021 and 2022. And they are the big dog, globally, of crashworthiness, in my estimation. They do a fucking awesome job determining their results, and an even better job explaining it to the public. 

Under the IIHS system, Palisade gets the highest possible award, two years in a row. 

These two organisations, ANCAP and IIHS, I would argue, simply cannot both be right, because we’re talking about (essentially) the same vehicle. So you have to decide: Who’s more credible; Who can you trust?

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