Mazda CX-9 5 star ANCAP rating gives Mazda its safest range ever

MAZDA says it was a natural evolution of their brand to achieve a 5-star safety rating across all cars in its range.

The brand-new Mazda CX-9 goes on sale on Friday July 8th, and the seven-seater SUV was just awarded 35.87-points out of 37 for safety by the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP).

The 5-star rating means all cars in Mazda’s range have been awarded the maximum possible score.

Mazda marketing director Alastair Doak says this was just part of a natural progression for Mazda instead of a concerted effort.

“With our four brand pillars, i-ACTIVESENSE safety is in there,” he told Wheels.

“Most of that is active safety through our i-ACTIVESENSE technology and chassis.

“We have continued to improve and focus on crash friendliness. I think a natural conclusion to that was our cars would be built to all generate 5-star ratings.”

Doak says Mazda was confident it could achieve the maximum score across the range – which includes Wheels’ Car of the Year; the MX-5, for the first time ever.

“We were pretty confident with our latest generation product that they are all very, very safe – either in avoiding the incident in the first place, or if you do unfortunately end up in a crash, to deliver maximum protection for the occupants,” Doak added.

“It was just an evolution of the brand and of the vehicles themselves.”

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ANCAP has been urging new car buyers to avoid models that score less than 5 stars in its tests.

However, Doak says Mazda didn’t take this into consideration when it began pushing for greater safety.

“We are putting our own focus on safety, so it was important for us to get the message out and probably the most obvious way is as a comparison against our competitors and to put our cars through the ANCAP process,” he continued. “That was more the motivation.”

The CX-9 received perfect marks for both the side and pole tests, and was awarded ANCAP’s highest rating of good for whiplash and pedestrian protection.

“This is the first time we’ve subjected the CX-9 to the ANCAP crash test process,” said ANCAP chief executive officer James Goodwin.

“Safety is an important consideration for buyers in this class as this model is likely to be used to transport children and other family members.

“CX-9 buyers have previously gone without a rating so we have filled this gap with safety-savvy consumers now able to enter the showroom with confidence, knowing all new variants offer the top level of safety.

“For a large, heavy vehicle, it performed extremely well in each of the destructive tests and comfortably achieved a 5 star ANCAP safety rating.”