Recent safety tests reveal that the GWM Steed pickup truck, sold in SA, “disintegrates” in a head-on collision at just 64km/h. This will be very surprising news to Steed owners, who hadn’t realised that their vehicles could reach such speeds, and had assumed most disintegration would happen long before impact.
According to Sunday Times Daily consumer journalist Wendy Knowler, who has seen footage of recent safety tests conducted in Munich, the front cab of the Chinese-built Steed can be seen “disintegrating horribly” in a simulated head-on collision at relatively low speed.
While this will no doubt have alarmed some Steed owners, you have to admit it’s more or less what it says on the box.
GWM stands for Great Wall Motors, and, to be fair, I am fairly confident that not one 14th-century warrior seeking to overthrow the Ming Dynasty has successfully managed to get into or over a GWM Steed.
Also, a steed is something you ride on top of: only a weirdo wants to get inside a steed and try to control it from the inside like a horrific meat-puppet. Did any of those safety tests show what happens when you travel on the roof of a Steed? No. All they showed is that you’ll probably be exploded like a grape in a garbage compactor, not that you’ll soar away in a gentle parabola, landing clear of the whole conflagration.
I’m being flippant, of course. Cheap, badly designed death traps should not be killing people on SA’s roads. That’s the job of expensive, beautifully designed death traps. I mean, what’s the point of spending R1m on a car that you disintegrate at 200km/h when you could spend R200,000 and disintegrate it at 64km/h?
SA roads are the Wild West. We all know it, so why shouldn’t international manufacturers know it too, and exploit it by dumping rubbishy cars on us?
Again, I’m making light of a national crisis that kills 12,000 South Africans a year. We have some of the most narcissistically, nihilistically aggressive and inept drivers in the world. Policing those drivers seems to be a foreign concept to the government and the authorities, like suggesting to a turtle that it should play the piano, or an ANC bureaucrat that they should do their job.
But honestly, getting outraged about the GWM Steed is not a dance I can do convincingly.
I’m glad there are safety experts flagging it, and I’m glad that excellent journalists like Knowler are reporting on it. But this is just how we roll in SA: on fire, on two wheels and a frayed Marie Biscuit spare, with a wrench where the steering wheel should be and a wad of hundreds in our pocket to bribe the police who almost certainly won’t pull us over.
Speaking of being on fire, remember the Ford Kuga? Remember how Ford paid out hundreds of millions in damages to victims, and pulled the car off the market because it literally spontaneously combusted, and was forced by government to put warnings on all its other models?
Of course you don’t, because it didn't happen. And it didn’t happen because SA roads are the Wild West. We all know it, so why shouldn’t international manufacturers know it too, and exploit it by dumping rubbishy cars on us, safe in the knowledge that massive class action lawsuits aren’t a thing here, or that victims of murderously bad engineering can just be told to bugger off?
But most of all, we have to admit, we just don’t care. Install e-tolling gantries, and our reaction is huge, united and ultimately decisive. But kill 12,000 people on the roads, every single year? Well, that’s just life, isn’t it? And what can anyone really do?
The answer, of course, is plenty. And if you’re about to get into a GWM Steed, it’s very simple: step away from the vehicle, turn around, and walk in the opposite direction.
I guarantee you’ll get there quicker anyway ...
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