Edmunds: Here Are All the Cars That Just Lost Their IIHS Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ Ratings (Plus The 48 Safest Cars On The Road Rated by IIHS.)

Investment Analysis Clubs Destiny Solutions Corporation
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Here Are All the Cars That Just Lost Their IIHS Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ Ratings

IIHS changes criteria

The IIHS is a nonprofit organization that, among other activities, performs crash tests on most vehicles on sale today. Those findings, in addition to criteria including availability of advanced safety features and headlight illumination performance, influence the IIHS’s overall safety rating. The vehicles that meet the most stringent requirements are awarded a Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick+ award, with the latter being the highest achievable.

And manufacturers pay a lot of attention to the awards the IIHS delivers. Here’s a Ford press release, for instance, that touts the top-tier good rating achieved by the Escape, along with a Top Safety Pick award.

Ford might want to settle on the releases, however, as the Escape was one of the many vehicles that had its Top Safety Pick award stripped after the IIHS updated its requirements for TSP and TSP+ designations. The new requirements are:

Top Safety Pick

:pushpin: Good ratings in the driver- and passenger-side small overlap front tests and original moderate overlap front test (no longer requires data from roof strength and head restraint tests)

:pushpin: Acceptable or good rating in the updated side test (new)

:pushpin: Acceptable or good headlights [as] standard (changed from “available”)

:pushpin: Advanced or superior rating for daytime vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention (no longer requires data from the vehicle-to-vehicle crash protection test)

Top Safety Pick+

:pushpin: Good ratings in the driver- and passenger-side small overlap front tests and original moderate overlap front test (no longer requires data from roof strength, head restraint and original side tests)

:pushpin: Good rating in the updated side test (new)

:pushpin: Acceptable or good headlights [as] standard (unchanged)

:pushpin: Advanced or superior rating for daytime vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention (no longer requires data from the vehicle-to-vehicle crash protection test)

:pushpin: Advanced or superior rating for nighttime vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention (new)

The new side test, which the IIHS describes as “[involving] 82 percent more energy than the original test,” is the most significant contributing factor for the updated ratings, followed by the requirement of high-performing headlights. Strong results in the nighttime pedestrian crash avoidance test are also new requirements for the TSP+ rating.
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On the flip side we see this pictorial list of the 48 car models which carry the highest safety ratings:

Vehicles that perform best in our evaluations qualify for TOP SAFETY PICK, which has been awarded since the 2006 model year, or TOP SAFETY PICK+, which was inaugurated in 2013.

These awards identify the best vehicle choices for safety within size categories during a given year. Larger, heavier vehicles generally afford more protection than smaller, lighter ones. Thus, a small car that qualifies for an award might not protect its occupants as well as a bigger vehicle that doesn’t earn the award.

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