Both the SQ8 and Macan have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The SQ8 has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Macan’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
The SQ8’s standard pretensioning seatbelts also sense rear collisions and remove slack from the seatbelts to help protect the occupants from whiplash and other injuries. The Macan doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
A passive infrared night vision system optional on the SQ8 Prestige helps the driver to more easily detect people, animals or other objects in front of the vehicle at night. Using an infrared camera to detect heat, the system then displays the image on a monitor in the dashboard. The Macan doesn’t offer a night vision system.
The SQ8 has a standard blind spot warning system which uses sensors to alert the driver to objects in the vehicle’s blind spots where the side view mirrors don’t reveal them. A system to reveal vehicles in the Macan’s blind spot costs extra.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the SQ8’s standard rear cross-path warning system uses sensors in the rear bumper to alert the driver to vehicles approaching from the side, helping the driver avoid collisions. The Macan doesn’t offer a cross-path warning system.
Both the SQ8 and the Macan have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front and rear side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, front and rear seatbelt pretensioners, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, all wheel drive, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, post-collision automatic braking systems, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems and rearview cameras.
The Audi SQ8 weighs 924 to 1173 pounds more than the Porsche Macan. The NHTSA advises that heavier vehicles are much safer in collisions than their significantly lighter counterparts.
For its top level performance in IIHS driver and passenger-side small overlap frontal, moderate overlap frontal, side impact, roof strength and head restraint tests, its standard vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention system, its standard vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention system, and its available headlight’s “Acceptable” rating, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety grants the SQ8 the rating of “Top Pick” for 2021, a rating granted to only 135 vehicles tested by the IIHS. The Macan has not been tested, yet.