Finally a car with a decent pedestrian safety rating

Until now, the EuroNCAP pedestrian safety test results usually looked no better than this:

That's a result of Chevrolet Cruze, which I think has set a new record for adult occupane protection (96%), which is cool for a relatively inexpensive car. But its pedestrian safety reult is still poor.

As you may know, EuroNCAP is going to significantly boost the pedestrian safety score's effect on the overall "star" rating. This will be introduced gradually over the next three years (details here), but in short, with these usual safety scores you can't dream of five stars any more.

Until now, automakers didn't rush to complain to these new strict requirements, so even in the latest test results almost all pedestrian safety ratings are totally unimpressive. Almost all, but not completely all. There is now a car whose rating would qualify for five stars even in 2012! It's BMW X1, and here's how its result looks:

And what's inteeresting, this car doesn't have an ugly or bloated hood. It looks just normal (not as normal as Cruze, of course, but it's as normal as BMW could be). That means that it's not an impossible task to comply with that pedestrian safety requirements.