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By Andrew Ganz
Tuesday, Aug 14th, 2012 @ 12:01 am
A new crash test that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says is far more realistic than its outgoing frontal offset test has proven challenging for the nearly one dozen entry-level luxury sedans the agency tested.
Only the Volvo S60 and the Acura TL earned top marks in the small overlap test, which sees 25 percent of the tested vehicle’s front end striking a 5-foot tall rigid barrier at 40 mph. IIHS says that the test is designed to simulate “what happens when the front corner of a car collides with another vehicle or an object like a tree or utility pole” rather than against a deformable offset object as current tests do.
According to the institute’s research, the new crash test simulates about a quarter of all real-world accidents.
IIHS won’t be abandoning the current crash test style, but it will use the new small overlap test as an additional measurement of vehicle safety and structural crashworthiness.
The Infiniti G received an acceptable rating, while the Acura TSX, BMW 3-Series,Lincoln MKZ and Volkswagen CC all earned a marginal grade. The Audi A4, LexusES, Lexus IS and Mercedes-Benz C-Class ranked at the bottom of the segment with the agency’s lowest rating: Poor. All 11 tested vehicles are 2012 models, although only the Lexus ES and Lincoln MKZ see significant changes for 2013.
IIHS has told Leftlane in the past that it considers marginal and poor to be essentially failing grades
“Nearly every new car performs well in other frontal crash tests conducted by the Institute and the federal government, but we still see more than 10,000 deaths in frontal crashes each year,” IIHS President Adrian Lund says. “Small overlap crashes are a major source of these fatalities. This new test program is based on years of analyzing real-world frontal crashes and then replicating them in our crash test facility to determine how people are being seriously injured and how cars can be designed to protect them better. We think this is the next step in improving frontal crash protection.”
Automakers nearly universally ace existing crash tests, something IIHS applauds. But the new small overlap test is designed to be much more difficult, a move that the institute hopes will lead to even safer cars in the future as automakers seek its Top Safety Pick rating.
As the images show, there are stark contrasts between the cars that performed well in the test and those that performed poorly. In particular, the difference between the way the cars’ safety cages held up is staggering. The first two images in our gallery above are of the top-ranked Volvo S60, while the third and fourth are of the poor-performing Lexus IS. We also included a smattering of other vehicles to show the intensity of the test
was compared to the 7-Series thats scary, not the 120km/h crash.
