Hyundai's Genesis named safest car of the year

Hyundai Motor’s luxury Genesis sedan

By Park Jin-hai

Hyundai Motor’s luxury Genesis sedan has been named the safest car of the year by the government.

In vehicle safety tests carried out by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, the Genesis scored 96.6 points out of 100.

The test evaluated 13 domestically sold cars from nine carmakers and announced the 10 safest vehicles Wednesday by totaling the scores of each vehicle in four safety tests including, crash and pedestrian safety experiments.

The Genesis received perfect scores in the frontal and side-impact tests, and also topped the pedestrian safety test with 25.6 points.

The safety tests were conducted on seven locally produced vehicles, including the Hyundai Sonata, the Spark EV and the Cruze of GM Korea, a local unit of U.S. automaker General Motors, and Kia's Soul and Sorento.

The ministry also tested six imported vehicles, including the Volkswagen Golf, the E300 of Mercedes-Benz, the Lexus ES350 and the QM3, an SUV imported and distributed by Renault Samsung, the local unit of the French automaker Renault.

Kia’s SUV Sorento and its minivan Carnival came second and third, scoring 92.1 points and 91 points, respectively.

Among the six imported cars, the Volkswagen Golf received the highest score of 90.3 points, closely followed by the Mercedes-Benz E300 with 90.2 points.

Any vehicle with a total score of 83.1 points or higher in the four crash tests was given the highest, Level 1, safety grade.

Audi A6 and the Lexus E350 were also given the Level 1 grade by scoring 87.6 and 86.7 points respectively.

Despite local popularity, Renault Samsung’s compact SUV QM3 was given the lowest, Level 5, grade, with a 77.2 total score. It scored 51.3 points out of 67 in the frontal-impact test, the lowest among all vehicles tested.