Malaysian car brands need to stop offering damaged safety equipment on cheaper models

In the past decade or so, Malaysian car buyers have made great progress. From focusing only on appearance, performance and space, we now have a very demanding consumer group who ask more relevant questions about safety features (for example, how many airbags does it have? Does it have electronic stability control? Active safety function and collision safety level.

I'm glad to know that. In general, Malaysia's car specifications have gradually improved over the past few years. Not long ago, a brand-new Toyota Camry, a d-segment sedan, was sold here without any form of electronic stability control (ESP, ESC or VSC, whatever you call it).

Now, the latest Camry is not only equipped with ESP as standard, but also has a full set of active safety functions, equipped with automatic emergency braking (AEB), adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assistance and blind spot monitoring. In fact, almost all Toyota products in Malaysia are equipped with ESP as standard, even the cheapest Yaris. Only the long tooth Avanza is an exception.

So are more basic safety functions such as airbags. A few years ago, you needed at least a model C to have more than two airbags, but now even the Perodua Myvi has at least four. Kia Picanto, technically a segment a, has six airbags. Similarly, AEB and other active safety features, once exclusive to high-end premium cars, are now available on both the Perodua Axia and Bezza 2019.

But it's not all roses, obviously, because while we've seen great progress in most areas, some things remain the same. Even though Malaysian car buyers have higher requirements for new car safety equipment, many car brands in Malaysia are still used to providing safety kits on lower price and lower price models.

I can forgive the old model that was launched a few years ago. It was a different time. The Iriz-a premium airbags offer only two milestones in Malaysia's premium airbags, such as the model 6.

At that time, Perodua Myvi had only two airbags and no ESP, even the most expensive variant. It wasn't until the end of 2017 that it matched the protons and moved the goalposts further to include AEB. Stability control is also installed on Myvi and has recently been added to Axia and Bezza. A good by-product of competition, however unbalanced, is that all parties are improving.

But back to the current issue, we still have brand new models to launch with compromise safety kits here and now in 2020. In the last month's three largest releases - the Proton X50, Honda City and Nissan Almera - all have fewer airbags, lower variants than the more expensive variants.

X50 standard and city S and E models lack side curtain airbags in other models of their respective series. This is not only a reduction in the number of airbags, it also means that in a serious crash, rear passengers are not protected by airbags at all. Front and dual front airbags for driver and four side only.