Why Is Safety Important For Salary Sacrifice Electric Cars?

If you're not familiar with Salary Sacrifice you can read all about it here.

An employer has greater legal responsibilities over an employee (or their family members) when travelling in a company car in comparison to an employee using his/her own car.

The details of this is complex, but in very simple terms a company car is considered an extension of the employee's work place and, of course, the car is also provided by deducting the running costs from the employee's gross pay.

Here are some links which may help explain it in more detail*:

• Croner: Employer's duties for company cars
• Health and Safety Executive
• RoSPA: Safer Driving for Work
• RoSPA: Driving for Work - Using Own Vehicles

*Please note that these reference points are not exhaustive and other sources can be found. Also note that some of these websites may require the use of 'cookies' not applicable to this site and/or subscriptions.

NCAP Safety Ratings For Salary Sacrifice Electric Cars

The European New Car Assessment Programme (known as 'NCAP') provides testing of the safety of new car and van models.

Safety is tested by buying new cars from dealerships and then testing them in a laboratory to simulate the effects of accidents and the consequences of those accidents on individual vehicles and the occupants.

Cars which only meet the minimum legal standard (often known as 'type approval') receive 0 stars.

Cars which exceed the minimum a awarded stars according to a rating system, which works as follows:

• 0 Star Safety: Meeting type-approval standards so can legally be sold but lacking critical modern safety technology
• 1 Star Safety: Marginal crash protection and little in the way of crash avoidance technology
• 2 Star Safety: Nominal crash protection but lacking crash avoidance technology
• 3 Star Safety: At least average occupant protection but not always equipped with the latest crash avoidance features
• 4 Star Safety: Overall good performance in crash protection and all round; additional crash avoidance technology may be present
• 5 Star Safety: Overall excellent performance in crash protection and well equipped with comprehensive and robust crash avoidance technology

You can read more about the NCAP system using this link

NCAP Safety For Electric Cars

We've presented the results of NCAP testing in the table below specifically for electric cars.

We've prepared this particular table because electric cars are typically why employees participate in a Salary Sacrifice plan.

The taxable benefit of an electric company car is typically less than the tax/National Insurance due on the equivalent wages.

In some instances though, hybrid company cars may be more suited to an employee's driving patterns.

We've also set up a more general list of NCAP safety ratings for cars which you can see by clicking here.