New Maruti Ertiga meets Bharat NCAP safety norms

Maruti Suzuki’s latest model in the market, the new Ertiga has reportedly met the criteria for the upcoming Bharat NCAP safety norms. According to Maruti, the new Ertiga is compliant with Bharat NCAP’s frontal offset impact, side impact and pedestrian protection tests.

These new safety regulations will be compulsory and will regulate the structural rigidity of cars among other things. Maruti has been recently in news regarding the discontinuation of its models like Gypsy and Omni, which according to the company would not be able to meet these upcoming crash test and BSVI emission norms.

The new Ertiga is among the nine other models from Maruti Suzuki that have passed the Bharat NCAP safety norms. These include Swift, Dzire and Vitara Brezza among others. The latest Ertiga is based on company’s new Heartect platform that is lighter yet much more stronger than previous platforms.

The Heartect platform is the same that is found on other Maruti cars like the Swift, Baleno and Ignis. The Heartect platform enables the Ertiga to loose around 10-20 kg weight as compared to the older generation model. While the wheelbase of the new Ertiga is same as the older model, there’s an overall increase in dimensions. The new model is 99mm longer, 40mm wider and 5mm taller compared to the last generation Ertiga

The new Ertiga is also high on safety features like dual-front airbags, ABS with EBD, Isofix child seat mounts, speed sensitive door locks, speed warning system and rear parking sensors as standard across the range. Apart from these, the higher end models also get height adjustable front seat belts, rear parking camera ESP and hill-hold feature.

The new Ertiga is powered by either a petrol engine or a diesel unit. The 1.5-litre, mild hybrid, petrol engine churns out 105 Bhp of power and 138 Nm of torque. The 1.3-litre mild hybrid diesel engine is the same as found on the previous model. Prices for the new Ertiga start at Rs 7.44 lakh for the base model and Rs 10.90 lakh for the top end model.

Indian cars will move to a new safety regime from the 1st of October 2018. Called Bharat New Vehicle Safety Assessment Program (BNVSAP), the new safety regime will put all cars sold in India through rigorous crash tests. Only cars that pass these tests will be sold in the Indian market. As minimum requirements to qualify these tests, all cars applying need to have a driver airbag, ABS, seat belt reminder, speed alert and reverse parking sensors. All these features are already available on the Ertiga.

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