Ford Australia president, Bill Osborne believes the new FG Falcon can outsell Holden’s Commodore even without standard curtain airbags on all of its models.
Ford detailed the new Falcon’s impressive active and passive safety story at the media launch of the car in Victoria’s Yarra Valley last night. But Osborne and his executives came under fire during question time when they confirmed that curtain airbags were a $300 option on all but the top model Falcons.
Both Holden’s Commodore and Toyota’s Aurion – the Falcon’s only locally-built large car rivals – get curtain airbags as standard.
Osborne
Ford says the Falcon is designed to deliver real-world safety benefits and that the car is the safest vehicle ever developed by Ford in Australia. Much of the work that’s gone into the car’s crash safety performance was achieved with state-of-the-art virtual engineering using Ford’s enormous supercomputing facilities at its US Dearborn headquarters, and Volvo’s crash test facilities at Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ford Australia’s virtual engineering chief engineer, Adam Frost explained that the Falcon was tested for 38 real world crash modes in more than 5000 simulated crashes. Ninety real cars were crashed in 310 sled tests, and crash tests were performed 600 times on various sub-systems and components of the new Falcon. Yet Ford won’t know the Falcon’s NCAP crash rating until the car’s crashed during NCAP’s own crash testing procedure.
Ford’s vice president of product development, Trevor Worthington, said he didn’t yet know when the car would be tested by NCAP.
“Every time you do a crash, you get a different outcome,” Worthington said.
“We can say that it is the safest Falcon ever – we know that to be the case – but we have to wait and see what the [NCAP] result will be.”
Both Worthington and Osborne defended the fact that side curtain airbags are optional in all but the Falcon’s flagship models.
“We’ve designed a vehicle for real world performance, not for features or marketing,” Osborne said.
“What matters is that people walk away from a crash. We have designed the vehicle to accept side curtain airbags… we don’t design for marketing, we design for the real world and the performance of this vehicle is one of the safest vehicles on the market, I say that without reservation. And it is one of the safest vehicles in its standard condition.”
Ford says the new Falcon’s key safety features include:
- Front seat head/thorax side airbags are standard on all models. G6E and G6E also get curtain airbags, but they’re a $300 option on all other models.
- Dual stage driver air bag and front passenger airbags are standard on all models
- Driver and front passenger Beltminder, which reminds them to fasten their seatbelts once the car begins to move
- Dynamic Stability Control and Traction Control on all petrol sedans
- High strength steels used in the passenger steel, including the use of ultra high strength Boron
- Intelligent crash sensing system which uses eight sensors, including door pressure sensors and upfront sensors which determine the severity of a crash and activate relevant safety systems accordingly in milliseconds
- ABS with EBD and EBA
- Specially developed tyres with improved grip and handling
- Reverse camera that’s standard of G6E and G6E Turbo models and a $500 option on other models in the range
- Driver fatigue warning, which beeps after the car has been driven for two hours (the timing can be adjusted by the driver)
- Reverse sensing system, which is standard on the G Series cars and optional on other models)
- ‘Follow me home’ lighting that stays on for a set period after the car is turned off.
The new Falcon media launch continues today with a long day of driving the various models in rural Victoria.