Is it actually safe to sit in row 3 of an SUV?

Would you put your child in row three of an SUV or a people mover if you knew it lacked head-protecting side airbags? How would you even know if it has them? The market for row-three protection offerings might surprise you…

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I’ve just carved up the market looking for the presence (or lack thereof) of head-protecting side curtain airbags - 20 seven-seat SUVs and four people movers. The results are staggering.

One of the obvious issues for anyone buying a new car is that when you go to a carmaker website, they give you a thousand reasons why their particular shitbox is the best. It’s miles in front - every time. And they obscure every known deficiency.

Every good reason not to buy that shitbox is hidden. Not addressed. Whatever.

So, this is two things, right? Talking it up in plain sight, and obscuring by omission every reason not to buy the vehicle. If they didn’t put third row airbags in there - they are not going to tell you. 

Here’s a question from Aaron.

That’s all quite true. Technically, ANCAP does look at third row airbags. (Like, are they fitted or not.) But ANCAP is not regulatory, and child safety (occupant safety) in row three is not functionally tested. At all. Ever. (Except possibly behind closed doors in carmaker R&D facilities.) But there are no crash test protocols I am aware of for row three.

All ANCAP says is: ‘Yeah - they’re fitted’ or ‘no - they’re not’. You can find this in the ‘technical reports’ attached to each safety rating result at ANCAP.com.au, but these are in at least three different confusing formats, and the information is not consistently presented. It’s another ANCAP dog’s breakfast, frankly. #bureaucrats.

Interestingly, ANCAP classifies curtain airbag protection as ‘absent’ for row three if it does not extend all the way to the rear pillar holding up the roof. If the vehicle offers partial protection for row three - as I understand the Sorento and Santa Fe do, it gets listed as ‘absent’ by ANCAP.

Aaron goes continues...

Just to address the specifics here: New Santa Fe is (essentially) new Sorento, from a fundamental engineering perspective. So, partial protection there, I’m tipping. Current Kluger offers head-protecting airbags in row three, according to ANCAP, so it would be insane and highly unlikely for Toyota to walk that back in 2021.

Is ANCAP paying attention to child safety in row three? No - it’s not tested. The functionality of any row three crash protection system is not tested. Dummies don’t go in row three. There’s no representative row three crashworthiness protocol.

This week I went through the somewhat laborious process of figuring which vehicles had the airbags in row three. The only place I know to look is at ANCAP, which I hate to recommend doing - mainly because they’re so hopeless at giving you meaningful safety information today. (‘Pathetic’ is probably a better word.)

Like, they mash up all testing from 2011 to 2020 and you need to be a frigging Rhodes scholar to know how five-star from 2011 or 2015 (whatever) is a different animal to five star last year or five-star next year - and this is set to get worse, not better. So, well done there, bureaucrats.

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HOT AIR(BAGS)

If you use ANCAP and buy a car based on it being independently rated at five stars it is very easy (in my opinion) to unwittingly purchase a car that would be regarded as a safety shitbox today. This gobsmacks me as an epic public disservice and a betrayal of ANCAP’s core mission. Personal opinion.

Carmakers are going to start to tell ANCAP to go to buggery pretty soon (I suspect) - they’re just deciding how big their balls are, and who’s gunna go first. So that’ll be entertaining. Stay tuned.

Here’s another example of that functional hopelessness: Last time ANCAP had a rating for a current model Nissan Patrol was 2017. (Three stars - and that was tested in 2011. So they haven’t tested a Patrol in nine long years. Just like Amarok. And so many others. Yet these ratings reside alongside current models.) 

But they have tested a current LDV D90. They tested that in 2017. (Five stars.) But between the start of 2018 and today, LDV has sold only 1030 D90s, while Nissan has sold 5254 Patrols.

So, in the domain of keeping people like you informed about the relative safety of vehicles, choosing to prioritize D90 over Patrol (for example) represents a net safety information deficit of more than 4000 people who bought Patrols and have no independent safety information about the vehicle - except that the predecessor was a fairly emphatically unsafe shitbox.

But ANCAP has tested the LandCruiser 200 - again not for nine long years. So, essentially no meaningful information about how LandCruiser protects you, versus Patrol (untested) or versus Fortuner (which was tested recently, to a grossly different system in 2019). They haven’t bothered updating Prado either (also tested in 2011).

So, if you’re in the market for a Toyota SUV, and you’re trying to figure out which one is safest. Good luck with that - you’ll need it.

Like I said, it’s a dog’s breakfast, and ANCAP is a rat’s nest of incompetence on this, failing in its primary mission - to inform consumers in a meaningful way. I simply could not locate any information about row three protection in that current Patrol. But here are the other results:

In people movers, Kia Carnival, Toyota Granvia and Honda Odyssey get big ticks for row three protection (and row four as well in the case of the four-row Toyota). But the LDV G10 does not - nor does it offer that side protection in row one or two - which goes some way to explaining its pathetic three-star rating.

Among seven-seat SUVs, MU-X, Fortuner and Everest manage to offer that row three protection, while Pajero Sport does not. I’m lumping them together because they’re all essentially converted dual-cab utes.

LandCruiser 200 also offers you that side protection, as does Prado, Kluger and Nissan Pathfinder, but I cannot tell you about Pajero or Patrol, because ANCAP’s evaluations there are hopelessly outdated and the technical reports do not include this information.

LDV D90 - yes, for row three. Also in the ‘Yes’ column are Honda CR-V, Mazda CX-8 and CX-9. 

The entrants which either fail to offer this protection, or offer it only partially, are X-TRAIL, Outlander, Santa Fe, Sorento, Ford Endura, and SsangYong Korando - but I cannot tell you about the Rexton because it has not been tested by ANCAP.

Please bear in mind that ‘no’ includes vehicles with partial protection for row three in some cases where the curtain does not extend all the way to the E-pillar. (No way to drill down into who’s who there.)

So, that’s 24 vehicles in total. Nine in the ‘no’ column.

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On Death Row?

I honestly cannot tell you if this is a meaningful metric about whether or not to buy a particular vehicle. Like: does it make sense not to buy a vehicle if it lacks this protection? In isolation: it’s probably a poor way to choose a vehicle.

Pathfinder has that protection, but it’s a shitbox, for example, with a space-saver spare adding insult to risk management in Australia. A vehicle like that, running on the space-saver, at night, on the freeway, at 80 kays an hour, in the rain, fully loaded… The term ‘safety liability’ springs to mind.

I don’t know how many people actually die or are injured in row three - and I don’t know the modality of their injuries. I can tell you only 27 children aged from newborn to 16 died on the road in the six months from April to September this year. (Clearly, they weren’t all sitting in row three - some were probably pedestrians, and some were probably the victims of parental incompetence - such as failing to be restrained by drunk parents, or somesuch.)

Transport injuries - which is not just cars, but is probably mainly cars - hospitalises about 19,000 kids a year. (In perspective, falls are roughly double that, and ‘other’ is the largest official category of child injuries - at about 50,000 annually.) Climbing a tree, playing at the beach or riding a bike or skateboard are probably all more dangerous activities than riding in row three with a capable driver at the helm.

I’d also want to know if side impact injury is even a major thing in row three - because if the modality of injury is mainly rear-enders, we’d clearly be better off focussing on structural protection and controlled crumpling to the rear, huh? It may well be that side curtain protection is something of a sideshow for row three. In the absence of data, how would you know?

So, basically, an SUV with head-protecting curtains for row three is better than one without, if all other things are equal. Which they never are, clearly. So there’s nuance and context here. It’s hardly binary. And we don’t even know how big or small the gains may be if these systems were mandated, fitted and tested - which they are certainly not going to be, any time soon.

We don’t even know what the main risks are if you’re sitting in row three at any age. I suspect it’s danger from the rear, given the proclivity of distracted shitheads to run into the car in front.

I would certainly take this issue into account when choosing a vehicle, but it wouldn’t be a go/no go decision for me. It’d be one factor for consideration, at best.

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