The RedBook Insider: RedBook Assists Used Car Safety Ratings

This month heralded the publication of latest annual Used Car Safety Ratings (UCSR) report from the widely respected Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC). The 2023 UCSR report covers vehicles with a 2021 model year and older, the rating of each vehicle being formed from statistical analysis of more than nine million vehicles across Australia and New Zealand involved in accidents.

Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) is one of the key drivers behind the UCSR, and for close to a decade, have worked with RedBook Australia to exclusively map these valuable safety ratings to the renowned RedBook vehicle database. The relationship spawned from TAC’s and other related government bodies desire to improve the general public’s knowledge of how the cars we drive and those we’re considering buying and how they perform in reality, beyond the structured testing regimes. Often confused with ANCAP, UCSR differs as it references real-world injury outcomes to people involved in crashes on the road, sourced from police reports and hence why there is a lag of roughly 2 years as the statistical sample validates.

RedBook’s role in bringing this all together is to provide the current and historical vehicle library, vehicle search function and detail around the respective safety features to support the UCSR ratings finding their way on to the acclaimed howsafeisyourcar.com.au website.  

RedBook’s exclusive association with MUARC and UCSR also means that we can provide this data under license to any potential user to support their needs. Featured extensively through the carsales.com.au site, the used car safety ratings are helping prospective buyers get real transparency when comparing vehicles on safety amongst other key attributes.

This data also has wide applicability across fleets, particularly those organisations utilising what is termed a “grey fleet”. Grey Fleets are essentially employees or contractors alike using their personal vehicles for business purposes. According to Safe Work Australia, “Grey fleets are often a blind spot for organisations and workers, because it is not yet commonly understood who is legally responsible for their safety. As a result – and although Work Health & Safety laws and other legislation apply to grey fleets – drivers and organisations employing them often do not fulfil their safety responsibilities.“

Using Redbook’s Registration to RedBook ID in conjunction with the base level data subscription will allow fleet operators to quickly profile their grey fleet, identifying vehicle’s active and passive safety attributes in addition to the minimum Duty of Care Obligations.

To find out more about RedBook’s USCR database feel free to reach out to the team via info@redbook.com.au.

Sources: Monash University Accident Research Centre, Howsafeisyourcar.com.au, NRSPP National Road Safety & Safe Work Australia.