The Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) has awarded five star safety ratings for the Suzuki Vitara and Kia Optima.
The ratings have grown ANCAP's market coverage to 93 per cent.
ANCAP CEO James Goodwin said that despite the Vitara lacking autonomous emergency braking available on its European models, its safety features have still won the rating.
“We’ve today awarded the maximum 5 star ANCAP safety rating for the Suzuki Vitara which is a real boost for consumers and Suzuki.
“Until now, the Vitara was ranked as the top-selling unrated model across all passenger, SUV and light commercial vehicles in both Australia and New Zealand.”
“The Vitara performed well in physical crash testing and includes reversing collision avoidance and a manual speed limiter as standard.”
The Kia Optima has also been awarded the rating across all variants.
“This opens the door for families and fleet buyers in the market for a replacement medium-size passenger car with top safety credentials.
“The Optima provides a high level of standard active safety features including all three grades of autonomous emergency braking, and demonstrated good performance in all crash and safety assist performance tests.”
Goodwin said that the ANCAP is now honing in on testing unrated brands.
“Our focus of late has been to target models which have sat unrated for some time and we will continue this focus over coming months in parallel with our usual program of rating new models entering the market."