[ggm]

I've ridden a Chinese electric taxi in Guangzhou. it was fine. If you want to walk away from a high speed crash I'd chose something else. If you stick under 60km/h which is what an awful lot of urban driving is, in traffic, I think you'd survive.

A 1960s mini minor, or a fiat 500 or even a fiat panda or a Citroen 2cv would be as dangerous. And yet, entirely street legal.

[gambiting]

Tbf, Fiat Panda has recently been downgraded to 1 out of 5 stars in European safety tests, due to the fact that the most advanced safety feature it has is a beeper if you don't put your seatbelt on. So while still legal, hopefully the dire safety rating should put at least some buyers off.

[dingaling]

You have to be careful when interpreting 'safety feature'. It does of course have airbags and SIPS but NCAP is now considering driver-assistance equipment as part of the assessment. So they moved the goalposts and retested the same Panda.

And as a result year's NCAP 'stars' signify something different to previous model years, so a zero rating in 2018 might still be better than four stars in 2014. That is important when comparing against second-hand models.

Personally I think that NCAP should just rate on actual impact protection measures and provide additional, supplemtary ratings for other features.

[ggm]

Static seatbelts. God.. what a pain they were. I liked the first panda, it felt a lot like a 2cv or a mini. I suspect it would be hard to get real insurance now, for the obvious reasons. Mind you.. the Dutch canta.. now there's a deathtrap and more than a few of them on th streets of Amsterdam

[emmelaich]

Wikipedia says that the Panda gets 4/5 for the 2012 version - -the latest apparently.

[gambiting]

As always, Wikipedia is outdated. And I was wrong too - Fiat Panda was awarded no stars recently, the worst possible score: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fleetnews.co.uk/amp/news/ma...