For enhanced safety, the front and rear seat shoulder belts of the Audi A4 Allroad have pretensioners to tighten the seatbelts and eliminate dangerous slack in the event of a collision and force limiters to limit the pressure the belts will exert on the passengers. The Toyota Venza doesn’t offer pretensioners for its rear seat belts.
The A4 Allroad’s pre-crash front seatbelts will tighten automatically in the event the vehicle detects an impending crash, improving protection against injury significantly. The Venza doesn’t offer pre-crash pretensioners.
Both the A4 Allroad and Venza have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The A4 Allroad 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 Venza’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 Audi A4 Allroad has standard driver and front passenger side knee airbags mounted low on the dashboard. These airbags helps prevent the driver and front passenger from sliding under their seatbelts or the main frontal airbags; this keeps them better positioned during a collision for maximum protection. Knee airbags also help keep the legs from striking the dashboard, preventing knee and leg injuries in the case of a serious frontal collision. The Venza doesn’t offer a front passenger side knee airbag.
The A4 Allroad has a standard Audi Backguard System, which use a specially designed headrest to protect the driver and front passenger from whiplash. During a rear-end collision, the Audi Backguard System moves the headrests forward to prevent neck and spine injuries. At the same time the pretensioning seatbelts fire, removing slack from the belts. The Venza doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
When descending a steep, off-road slope, the A4 Allroad’s standard Hill Descent Control allows you to creep down safely. The Venza doesn’t offer Hill Descent Control.
Both the A4 Allroad and the Venza have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, driver knee airbags, side-impact head airbags, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, all wheel drive, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, post-collision automatic braking systems, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, rearview cameras, available blind spot warning systems, around view monitors and rear cross-path warning.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does side impact tests on new vehicles. In this test, which crashes the vehicle into a post at 20 MPH, results indicate that the Audi A4 Allroad is safer than the Toyota Venza:
|
A4 Allroad |
Venza |
|
Into Pole |
|
STARS |
5 Stars |
5 Stars |
Max Damage Depth |
12 inches |
14 inches |
Hip Force |
666 lbs. |
835 lbs. |
New test not comparable to pre-2011 test results. More stars = Better. Lower test results = Better.