► Leapmotor’s bold new approach to safety tech
► Lane assist and speed warnings off as standard…
► … and it doesn’t care if it loses an NCAP star
Drivers hate active safety technology. A study on our sister publication Parkers found 25% of UK drivers who have lane assist don’t use it because they find it ‘actively annoying.’ Plus, 16% said they never use their car’s adaptive cruise control, while 15% report they avoid driver monitoring systems whenever possible. And I agree. It’s all annoying.
The reason why almost every new car on sale has this tech, despite its widespread hatred, is simple. Manufacturers need this technology to get their cars through Euro NCAP’s safety assessments. Without it, they’d be penalised by the safety body, even if their cars did a fantastic job of protecting occupants in an accident.
But what if manufacturers didn’t care what Euro NCAP thought and simply built their cars according to how their owners use them? It’d be refreshing, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what Leapmotor is considering for its upcoming electric vehicles.
At the launch of the C10 REEV, I got chatting to Francesco Giacalone, head of Leapmotor’s European marketing department. He told me his customers aren’t using lane assist and speed assist, so the brand is considering making the technology not on by default every time the car is started. It’d be the driver’s decision whether to use the tech, not the car’s.
‘Euro NCAP ratings will not always be inexpensive and will not always be easy to achieve,’ he said. ‘So, probably, at that point in time, there could be the compromise whether to not reach the NCAP, but to [instead] provide the promise of the [Leapmotor] brand, which is to deliver life-easing technology at an affordable price.
‘And again, right now, if you look at the markets, the five-star NCAP is not so spread. It’s reasonable to expect that not all Leapmotor products will achieve that standard because, on B-SUV, it’s fairly difficult to reach that level of standards.
‘Maybe to sacrifice one star to deliver the right product to the customer, with the full content of useful and life-easing technology? That could be the right choice.’
Surely not. Wouldn’t Euro NCAP crucify Leapmotor?
Oh yeah, there’s nowt so certain. But Leapmotor’s prepared for the fallout. Plus, its scores shouldn’t take too much of a hit because it won’t completely remove the technology from its cars. It’ll just all be automatically off when you switch on the ignition.
Giacalone agreed, saying: ‘Of course, we will not go to the extreme of the spectrum where we launch a car that has no active safety, and the passive safety is crap. All vehicles from Leapmotor are engineered with high-strength stainless steel on the side and the frame so the cabin is sturdy.
‘All those elements will be there. Just maybe, to achieve the five-star, you need some active safety which not all consumers equally appreciate. Then, either you make a compromise in that little last mile and probably that will cost you a star – that could be the case – but there’s no compromise on the broad security of the car.’
He closed his remarks on the topic by saying: ‘The message is that all the tech, hardware and software, is there at the service of the customer. So, if you want, we enable it.’
This is a huge shift in rhetoric from an industry so utterly obsessed with meeting safety regulations – and one I reckon consumers will welcome. Let’s hope the Leapmotor can be the catalyst for change.