Ford's crash test pledge

Ford is ready to back its claims that the new FG Falcon is one of the safest cars on Australian roads by providing a base model XT without curtain airbags for the crucial ANCAP “pole” test. The side-impact pole test is voluntary but no new car can be awarded a maximum five-star rating unless it passes. Holden and Toyota have so far declined to offer a Commodore or Aurion respectively for a pole test.

Even before the critical new FG Falcon goes on sale, Ford has already come under fire in some quarters for failing to match arch-rival Holden and make curtain airbags standard across the new model range.

“What matters is the performance of the vehicle and the performance of this vehicle in its standard form is that it is one of the safest in the market. I say that without reservation.”

Osborne says the decision to volunteer a vehicle for the pole test had been made some time ago and needs only to be ratified by Ford's safety assessment committee in the US.

“It is going to happen, you can be sure of that,” he says. “We are not going to speculate on our NCAP performance but what I can tell you is this vehicle is one of the safest on the road in real-world terms and you can tell from the quality and the depth of the engineering that we can back that up."

“If you want to compare vehicles for safety performance you need to know the actual crash test deformation data and all of those things — you can't do it by comparing features lists.”

Holden's recent decision to make curtain airbags standard across the Commodore range almost certainly took Ford by surprise, coming as it did after the Blue Oval had released specification levels for the new model. Ford has made the curtain bags standard on the higher-level models but left the key safety feature as a $300 option on the base models.

“It is not a flaw in the planning,” Osborne says. “A flaw would have been if the work had not been done to make the curtain bags available."

“That work has been done and this (making the curtain bags standard) is a very simple thing to fix if we so desire.”

Ford's claims that the FG underwent the most comprehensive safety engineering program for any Falcon and is supported by an impressive list of crash tests — real and computer simulated — going back as far as two years before the first “real” FG was built.

“The design and simulation testing for this car was unprecedented,” says Ford Australia's chief engineer for virtual safety, Adam Frost.

“Using the super computers at (Ford head-quarters in) Dearborn (Michigan), we were able to run the most complex crash simulations and repeat them for multiple design testing.”

Frost says a typical four-hour simulation on the super computers could take as long as 18 months to run on a typical home computer.

Ford Australia was able to run 5000 simulated crashes at Dearborn, Frost says.

During development of the FG 90, full vehicle crashes were conducted using the world-leading crash laboratories of Ford in Dearborn and of Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Key developments in the FG safety program were the use of four grades of high-strength steel, including ultra-high-strength boron in side-intrusion protection; optimised load paths to shift crash energy around the passenger cell; a deformation by design structure with predetermined deformation points; a rigid occupant safety cell and the intelligent crash-sensing system.

This is built around a series of sensors in the front and side of the vehicle linked to a central crash computer fully protected in the centre of the car with its own sealed power supply. The computer tastes sensor input 4000 times a second, with the sensors capable of reading the possibility of an impact from little more than the pressure wave of an object about to hit the car.

Within one millisecond, the crash computer is alerted and by 7.5 milliseconds it has assessed the probable severity of the impact and begun taking assertive action by inflating the airbags.

And at 70 milliseconds the computer unlocks the doors — all before the driver is aware of the accident. That awareness comes at about 150 milliseconds, by which time all the passive safety functions have done their job.