There's something off with some GNCAP ratings

Earlier this month I posted about a bit of jugaad in GNCAP's protocols. Here’s why it deserves the urgent attention of not only the organisation themselves but anyone interested in the ratings, really.

Recap

GNCAP takes away one star from a car's rating if its total points are overly skewed by only one of the two crash tests. This is supposed to take away undeserved stars — but the way GNCAP implements it ends up deleting even stars that have been earned fair and square.

Consequences

This can, and actually has led to cars losing stars for* being safer.

*for ≠ despite

There are cases where the penalty is correctly implemented — the Kia CARENS’ 4-star-worthy score was deemed overly unbalanced because it had 16 points in the side impact but only 6 in the frontal impact — so it was downgraded to 3 stars.

The Kia Carens, an understandable implementation of the penalty.

The problem, however, is when a car is being limited by something else. The Suzuki Ertiga doesn't offer curtain airbags, which limits it to 2 stars right away. It also so happens that its "4-star-worthy" total score (22+) is quite unbalanced — and indeed that would be a good reason to not allow it more than a 3-star rating no matter what.

But it is objectively a terrible reason to go and delete one of the 2 stars it has.

I won't budge on that, because it's doing more than just simply not allow one high score to improve the rating — it’s taking away a star just for having better crash protection.

Consider, for example, Maruti's own Alto K10 — it has one more star because it's worse!

The 2-star Maruti Alto K10 is similar to or worse than the 1-star Ertiga

What should be done?

Ideally, IMO, the troublesome jugaad clause should be scrapped and instead limits required on both the front and side test scores for any star rating, as other NCAPs have done in the past.

It would involve rolling back and retroactively updating a few ratings, but IMO the problem is serious enough that any responsible consumer test organisation would do so.