Fewer vehicles attain spots on safety list as bar is raised
Car buyers who put a premium on safety will find they will need much less time to peruse the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s list of top picks for 2018.
Compared with 2017, only about half as many models earned a coveted designation as an IIHS Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick Plus when the institute released its list on Thursday.
Sixty-two vehicles have so far earned one of those two designations for 2018, down from 120 in 2017 — a result of several changes to the criteria. The insurance industry-funded institute tightened a measurement of the effectiveness of headlights and added a collision test intended to ensure that front passengers are protected like their counterparts behind the wheel.
The new tests cost certain models from some automakers — including General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and even Volvo — the chance to use one of the IIHS designations, which have become an important marketing tool and pushed companies to improve their performance on the institute’s tests.
Adrian Lund, president of the insurance institute, did not see the drastic reduction as a bad sign for consumers or automakers.
“One thing I want to be sure that people are really clear on,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that vehicles are less safe than they were last year. Rather, we’ve raised the bar, and we still have this many vehicles that meet the new criteria and are providing state-ofthe-art protection.”
The added crash test — a passenger-side front small overlap test — is meant to mimic what happens when a car runs off the road and hits a tree or utility pole. Vehicles must get a Good or Acceptable rating in that test to qualify as a Top Safety Pick Plus.
Top Safety Pick Plus winners also must now offer headlights that earn a rating of Good, rather than either Good or Acceptable. For the regular Top Safety Pick designation, a requirement was added that headlights must be rated Good or Acceptable.
The emphasis on headlights makes sense: Walking away from a crash is good, but avoiding a crash entirely is better. According to the most recent fatal- ity data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nighttime crashes killed 19,274 people in 2016, more than the 17,907 killed during daylight.
“As we got into this area of headlamps, frankly, we were amazed to see how little light vehicles were actually putting on the road,” Lund said. “When we put these vehicles on the road, people couldn’t see very far down the road at night. This is a key feature of keeping people safe.”
At least one vehicle from every automaker received one of the awards, and the models that kept their Plus status cut across price points.