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 Hyundai Nexo doesn’t offer pretensioners for its rear seat belts.
Both the ZDX and Nexo 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 Nexo’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.
In the past twenty years hundreds of infants and young children have died after being left in vehicles, usually by accident. When turning the vehicle off, drivers of the ZDX are reminded to check the back seat if they opened the rear door before starting out. The Nexo doesn’t offer a back seat reminder.
The Acura ZDX 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 Nexo doesn’t offer knee airbags.
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 Nexo doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
Over 200 people are killed each year when backed over by motor vehicles. The ZDX has standard Reverse Automatic Braking that uses rear sensors to monitor for objects to the rear and automatically applies the brakes to prevent a collision. The Nexo doesn’t offer automatic braking for stationary objects directly to the rear.
The ZDX offers all-wheel drive to maximize traction under poor conditions, especially in ice and snow. The Nexo doesn’t offer all-wheel drive.
Both the ZDX and the Nexo have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact 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 Acura ZDX weighs 1305 to 2062 pounds more than the Hyundai Nexo. The NHTSA advises that heavier vehicles are much safer in collisions than their significantly lighter counterparts.