Germans Crush Chinese SUV

The Jiangling Landwind SUV scored zero stars from the ADAC, the German auto club, in a front end collision test last week. The ADAC made it clear that this is the worst test score in their twenty year history. The Isuzu Rodeo-like Landwind has been on sale in Germany, Holland, and Belgium and is set to go on sale in Great Britain soon. The Chinese-made SUV competes against other SUVs from Kia and Hyundai. There are several nice galleries of the test available. Bootnetworks.com has this gallery, which is includes other crash test pictures for comparison. GMX.net also has a gallery.

We hate to sound like we?re defending this vehicle that performed so poorly, but we?ve received some eye witness accounts of the test itself and the behavior of the test administrators. The general feeling was the engineers who were on hand were very unprofessional about this particular test, and reportedly tore off the driver?s door and the arm of the crash test dummy in disgust. Several journalists were invited to the witness the test, one of which provided this description to us. You can choose to believe it or not, but we smell a hint of anti-Chinese propaganda. This is a body on frame SUV, and most likely a direct copy of an older design. If you look at the Bootnetworks.com gallery that we linked to above, you will see that a previous generation Ford F-150 did not fair much better, neither did the Isuzu Rodeo. Such a vehicle would make a great example to illustrate any blanket safety issues with vehicles from a competing automotive industry. There probably isn?t an anti-Chinese auto campaign in Europe or Germany, but the whole affair seems a little fishy. When the ADAC says this is the worst performing car in twenty years, you have to think about whether they were more forgiving to some vehicles over that twenty year period. Regardless, we would not put our families in this vehicle.