Volvo has managed to take the leadership of creating high safety cars for many years, but there is a relatively new company that aims at revolutionizing the industry by electrifying transportation, and setting the standard in every category. The name of the company is Tesla, which is known to keep improving on its vehicles all the time, paying special attention to safety.
We will compare the safest all-electric SUV from Tesla with the safest gasoline-powered full-size SUV from Volvo, to see which one is the leader. Unlike normal internal combustion cars, the fully electric Tesla Model X doesn’t have a big front engine, which gives the vehicle an advantage during frontal offset and full width tests, as the durable empty steel absorbs the worst of the impact from occupants.
As a result in both the frontal tests by Euro NCAP, the driver and passengers had a good or adequate protection for all critical body parts, but unfortunately the neck protection of a dummy representing a ten-year-old boy was marginal.
The combustion engine in the front didn’t prevent Volvo to show excellent results which lost to Tesla by just 0.2 percent, but managed to achieve perfect results in terms of protecting kids in the side tests.
The XC90 scored nearly maximum points with good protection of all critical body areas, except a little elevated risk of injury for the chest the protection, of which was rated as adequate in the more severe side poll impact.
But Tesla’s results were superior, since the vehicle managed to absorb the impact, thanks to the strong side structure providing perfect safety for occupants. In the tests of the front seats and head restraints, both vehicles demonstrated good protection against whiplash injuries in the event of a rear-end collision.
Tesla is more vulnerable for road users in case of a collision, but with its advanced autopilot assists, the collisions reaches to minimum. Although, the Model X couldn’t avoid the collision with the kid and only managed to mitigate the impact in other safety tests.
Tesla has shown perfect results, better than any other vehicle ever tested in general. The bigger and heavier the vehicle the safer it is, but in this case, petrol cars have more rollover risk because of the highest center of gravity. Here, electric vehicles have an advantage, since the battery is mounted under the floor, it gives the vehicle a lower center of gravity, minimizing the chances to rollover, with respective 9.3 percent rollover risk for the Tesla Model X and 15.9 percent for the Volvo XC90.
So both vehicles appear to be very safe, but thanks to its electric drive-train and the leading position in the autonomous technology, the Model X demonstrated overall better results. It would be interesting to see how Tesla Cybertruck will perform during the crash test.
