HWASUNG, South Korea -- Kia Motors recently got what most automakers already have: a five-star European safety rating.
But Kia deserves credit. The car that earned the company’s first EuroNCAP top score for occupant safety was the lower-medium Cee’d, the first model to roll out of the company’s Slovakia plant just opened in April.
So Kia’s first top safety rating comes from the workers who less than a year ago had never built a single car.
The team responsible for the Cee’d’s safety engineering says there’s more to come.
“Every product from now on will have five stars,” said Song Young Hyun, director of the Cee’d safety team.
The Cee’d was designed for Europe, making the five EuroNCAP stars all the more special for the engineers.
The only problem is the European styling Kia chose for the Cee’d also led to the one large dent in the safety achievement. EuroNCAP gave the car just two out of four stars in pedestrian protection. This was mostly because of bumper position. Kia struck a compromise between safety and styling, says Baek Youn Ho, a principal research engineer on the team.
“Design engineers wanted the current design,” Baek said.
The team benchmarked Renault’s Megane and Volkswagen’s Golf, both current models have earned five-star ratings for adult occupants.
Baek says they were more impressed with Renault’s balancing of safety and performance.
Kia started safety engineering earlier in product development for the Cee’d than for earlier models. They also gave special attention to the Cee’d’s body structure. High-strength steel accounted for 60 percent of the car’s body weight, compared with 20 percent to 30 percent in the Cerato, which earned three stars when crash tested in 2006.
Kia also credits a new active headrest system supplied by Johnson Controls that protects driver’s necks during rear collisions.
Kia is working on how to maintain the Cee’d’s styling while improving pedestrian protection. Engineers are testing a way to make the hood pop up slightly to reduce impact energy.
Hyundai Motor i30 shares a platform with the Cee’d. The i30 went on sale in Korea and Europe in summer following the Cee’d’s Europe-only spring launch. A dispute with EuroNCAP is holding up safety results on the i30. Results from Hyundai’s r&d center -- which is the same as Kia’s -- are different from EuroNCAP’s, says Jun Ho Suck, senior executive vice president of vehicle development.
