Independent vehicle safety testing "not important", says major automaker's CEO

The newly appointed head of Fiat has stirred debate by arguing that independent crash-test safety ratings are "not important," suggesting that star scores handed out by testing bodies mainly end up confusing shoppers who already assume a brand-new car must be safe. His remarks take aim at the European crash-test programme whose results are also referenced in Australia, and they land at a sensitive moment for a brand trying to rebuild trust with buyers in Europe and beyond.

The criticism gets at a real tension in the industry. Independent testing exists precisely because a new car is not automatically a safe car — structure, restraint systems and driver-assistance features vary widely between models, and even between trim levels of the same model. Safety organisations counter that a comparable, publicly available score is the only practical way for a non-expert to tell those differences apart before signing a contract.

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