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Small Cars Struggle with IIHS’s New Crash Test
Only one of a dozen small car models the Honda Civic earned a top score in the latest batch of offset crash tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
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Only one of a dozen small car models the Honda Civic earned a top score in the latest batch of offset crash tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Both the two- and four-door versions of the Civic earned IIHS's "good" rating in the institute's severe quarter-offset frontal crash test.
The test measures what happens when only the left front quarter of a vehicle's front end strikes a rigid wall at 40 mph. Federal safety standards require vehicles to pass only a lower-speed full frontal impact test. IIHS says its test, which forces 25% of a vehicle's front-end crash structure to absorb the entire energy of a frontal crash, replicates a common type of impact.
Four other small cars the 2014 Scion tC and 2013 Dodge Dart, Ford Focus and Hyundai Elantra earned "acceptable" IIHS ratings. The Volkswagen Beetle and Chevrolet Sonic and Cruze received "marginal" ratings. Three models, the Nissan Sentra and Kia Forte and Soul, ranked "poor."
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