Only Two Small SUVs Get Top Scores In The IIHS’ Latest Crash Test

Evaluating new vehicles for their crashworthiness is critical to helping determine how a given car, truck, or SUV protects its occupants in a crash under a variety of circumstances. One of the enduring criticisms of new-vehicle crash-testing programs conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the industry-supported Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is that it’s difficult for consumers to determine which models are indeed safest when automakers revise their designs to ace the latest evaluations, so that most not all of the cars or trucks evaluated boast perfect or near-perfect scores.

Though NHTSA is slow to adapt its methods, one assumes given its bureaucratic underpinnings, the IIHS upholds the cars and trucks it tests to increasingly stricter standards by steadily rolling out new crash tests and tweaking its criteria for a given model to earn its “Top Safety Pick+” recommendation. Now the IIHS is again upping the proverbial ante by revamping its longest-running evaluation, the moderate overlap frontal crash-test, to include an instrumented rear-seat dummy for the first time.

The idea, according to the IIHS, is to “address a growing gap in the protection provided for front and rear occupants.” As before, a vehicle moving at 40 mph strikes 40 percent of a deformable barrier on the driver’s side of a vehicle to gauge the effects of an offset crash between two vehicles of the same weight moving at the same speed. But while the original offset test only included a crash dummy in the driver’s position for evaluation, the latest version adds a second dummy representing a small woman or 12-year-old child positioned in the back seat behind the driver.

“The original moderate overlap test was our first evaluation and the lynchpin of the Institute’s crash testing program,” says IIHS President David Harkey. “Thanks to automakers’ improvements, drivers in most vehicles are nearly 50 percent less likely to be killed in a frontal crash today than they were 25 years ago. Our updated test is a challenge to manufacturers to bring those same benefits to the back seat.”

Unfortunately, of the 15 small SUVs subjected to the updated moderate overlap test, only two of them—the Ford Escape and Volvo XC40—were up to the challenge, performing well enough to earn the Institute’s top Good rating. Nine—the majority of those evaluated—were given the lowest Poor score. All 15, by the way, were rated Good in the previous version of the test that did not consider the back-seat passenger’s protection.

To earn a Good rating here, crash forces measured by sensors in the second-row dummy must not exceed limits that would likely cause excessive head, neck, chest, abdomen or thigh injuries. Restraints must also prevent the dummy’s head from smashing onto the vehicle’s interior contacting the front headrest, and not allow the occupant to injuriously “submarine” forward under the lap belt. Poor rated models were found to be seriously lacking in these regards.

Here’s how the first round of IIHS’ updated moderate overlap test tests on small SUVs panned out. Expect other new-vehicle segments to undergo the IIHS’s new driver-side moderate overlap test crash tests in the coming months:

Good

Acceptable

Marginal

• Audi Q3
• Nissan Rogue
• Subaru Forester

Poor

• Buick Encore
• Chevrolet Equinox
• Honda CR-V
• Honda HR-V
• Hyundai Tucson
• Jeep Compass
• Jeep Renegade
• Mazda CX-5
• Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross

You can read the IIHS’ full report here; and check crash tests for other vehicle types for present and past model years here.