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The BMW X5 has just made its closest rival look distinctly underprepared. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ran both the X5 and the Mercedes-Benz GLE through its pedestrian front crash prevention programme. The X5 walked away with a good rating, the top mark available. The GLE, in standard form, managed only marginal.
The test itself is unforgiving. Dummies representing an adult or a child step into the path of a moving vehicle, by day and by night, at speeds between 12 and 25mph. A separate run sends an adult walking with traffic in the nearside lane at up to 37mph. Points are awarded for how much speed the car sheds across three attempts. Bonus points go to systems that warn the driver at least 2.1 seconds before impact.
The X5 simply did not hit anything. It avoided the child and adult crossings at both speeds in daylight. It repeated the trick after dark on dipped beam and on main beam. In the parallel adult run at 25mph it stopped clean, again with either headlamp setting. Push to 37mph, and the main beam run was still a clean sheet, with a warning fired at 2.1 seconds. On dipped beam alone it scrubbed an average of 35mph off before contact.
The GLE told a messier story. With Mercedes’ optional driver assistance kit fitted, it cleared the daytime child tests, but struck the dummy at 25mph after dark, having slowed to a crawl. Without that option box ticked, it fared worse, failing to shed meaningful speed in the 25mph and 37mph parallel runs and issuing warnings only two or three tenths of a second before impact. The X5’s advantage is not clever marketing. It is that BMW fits the hardware as standard.
There is a wider point buried here. The IIHS has been leaning on manufacturers to make crash avoidance sharper and to stop hiding it behind option packs. Regulators agree, with automatic emergency braking due to become mandatory on all new cars and light trucks by 2029. That legislation is forecast to save hundreds of lives a year. Until then, the gap between a good rating and a marginal one can come down to a tick box on an order form.
