Despite decades as the most popular car for taxi drivers in Mexico, Japanese car giant Nissan has announced that its Tsuru model will no longer be produced after a crash test revealed that the car garnered the lowest possible rating of zero stars.
To highlight the dangers of travelling in a Tsuru, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a brand new Nissan Versa, intended for the American market and subject to more stringent safety measures, into a Mexican-market Tsuru built in 2015.
The experiment saw the Versa, the cheapest available sedan in Nissan’s American fleet, go head to head with its Mexican equivalent, with the experiment highlighting the safety disparity between the two nations and two Nissan models. The video of the test has been widely distributed online as part of the #NoZeroStarCars shaming campaign, a project which hopes to remove all zero-star safety rated vehicles from roads all over the world.
In the footage below, both Nissan cars were travelling at just 65 km/h, striking each other in what is referred to by safety experts as a 50% overlap test. The Versa’s driver, whose impact is cushioned by front and side airbags, fares well, with the car’s safety cage standing up to the collision and maintaining the overall structure of the car.
The Tsuru... is a right off, with no airbag to protect the driver’s head from smashing directly into the crumpled frame, in what would most likely prove a fatal blow.
According to the New Car Assessment Programme, a safety performance agency with offices all over the world, the Nissan Tsuru is believed to have been involved in more than 4,000 deaths on Mexican roads between 2007 and 2012.
