iihs

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States runs a unique “small-overlap” crash test where they make all test-subject cars to crash into an immobile object with only part of the frontal area of the car. It is supposed to replicate what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with another vehicle or an object such as a tree or a lamp-post. In the test, 25%t of a vehicle’s front end on the driver’s side strikes a rigid barrier at 64 kph. And the 11 mini-cars tested performed poorly, although it’s not a huge surprise.

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Say what you want about the Americans, but they are a serious bunch when it comes to safety. The U.S. government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — NHTSA — is the one that mandates airbags and tyre-pressure monitors in all new cars, subdued automakers into making their roof strength higher while inadvertently making outward visibility worse due to thicker pillars, and is set to force rear-view cameras on all new cars by 2014 thereby making car prices higher. And if that weren’t enough, there are not one, but two agencies in the U.S. that conduct crash tests, one being the NHTSA and other being the private Insurance Institute for Highway Safety —

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For years, sub-compact cars have been shunned by snooty people who chose to drive a big car, citing concerns over safety. While their reasons probably have more to do with image than safety, the Insurance institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an independent American agency that crash-tests hundreds of cars every year, say that the snooty people were actually right. While many sub-compact cars such as the Honda Jazz and the Toyota Yaris scored full marks in standardised crash tests against a stationary barrier, their downfalls became obvious when they were slammed against a midsize Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry.

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