For enhanced safety, the front and rear seat shoulder belts of the Acura ZDX 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 Jeep Grand Cherokee doesn’t offer pretensioners for its rear seat belts.
Both the ZDX and Grand Cherokee have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The ZDX 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 Grand Cherokee’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 ZDX’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 Grand Cherokee doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
Both the ZDX and Grand Cherokee have rear cross-traffic warning, but the ZDX has Rear Cross Traffic Braking (automatically applies the brakes) to better prevent a collision when backing near traffic. The Grand Cherokee’s Rear Cross Path Detection doesn’t automatically brake.
Both the ZDX and the Grand Cherokee have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, driver and front passenger knee airbags, side-impact head airbags, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, blind spot warning systems, rearview cameras, rear cross-path warning and available around view monitors.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety does 40 MPH moderate front offset crash tests on new cars. In this updated test, results indicate that the ZDX is much safer than the Grand Cherokee:
|
ZDX |
Grand Cherokee |
Overall Evaluation |
GOOD |
POOR |
Structure |
GOOD |
GOOD |
|
Driver Injury Measures |
|
Head/Neck Rating |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Head Injury Criterion |
108 |
252 |
Chest Rating |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Thigh/hip Rating |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Thigh Forces L/R |
45/112 pounds |
180/360 pounds |
Leg/foot Rating |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Thigh Forces L/R |
45/112 pounds |
180/360 pounds |
Leg Forces L/R |
225/382 pounds |
495/607 pounds |
Restraints |
GOOD |
GOOD |
|
Rear Passenger Injury Measures |
|
Head/Neck Rating |
GOOD |
POOR |
Chest Rating |
GOOD |
POOR |
Thigh Rating |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Restraints |
GOOD |
ACCEPTABLE |