For testing, the IIHS buys vehicles from dealerships. It uses its own funds, but if an automaker requests a test on something that isn’t in the IIHS schedule, the carmaker reimburses that vehicle’s purchase price. In the lab, the vehicle is pulled by a cable into a barrier at the required speed, or the barrier is pulled into it. The crash dummies inside reveal injuries a human occupant would have sustained.
The vehicle is rated on side crash, and on small- and moderate-overlap front crash, along with headlight performance, seatbelt reminders, child-seat tether ease-of-use, and pedestrian detection for the emergency front braking system in day and night situations. The front tests are “overlap” because most real-world frontal crashes involve a portion of the vehicle’s front, not a complete head-on.
The IIHS recently updated how it crashes vehicles. In the old moderate-overlap front test, the vehicle only contained a dummy in the driver’s seat; there’s now also one in the seat behind it. The small-overlap front test now adds a front-seat passenger dummy. The new rating includes the severity of any injury to the passenger as well as to the driver, which was not part of the test before now.
The new side test uses a heavier barrier moving at higher speed, to better simulate being struck by an SUV. Many vehicles didn’t maintain their previous high ratings in these new tests — in fact,vehicle on our list that earned Marginal or Poor ratings in the updated side test earned the top Good in the original test. And that doesn’t include 23 vehicles that fell from Good to Acceptable, which we consider a high enough rating that they’re not on our list.
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