Last year, 101 vehicles took home awards from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 65 of which earned the institute’s highest honor — Top Safety Pick+. This year, just 48 won recognition, and only 28 took home the top prize. The reason? A tougher side-impact crash test and a test to see whether pedestrian detection systems work well at night.
America’s two crash-testing agencies America is unusual in that it has not one but two agencies that perform crash tests on nearly every car for sale in the country. One belongs to the federal government. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) conducts tests and rates cars for safety on a 5-star scale. But the insurance industry funds a separate lab that conducts its own crash tests. Insurance companies have a financial interest in making car crashes as rare and safe as possible. So a group of them fund their own safety agency that conducts its own battery of tests — the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS. Industry insiders tend to rate IIHS tests as a more demanding standard. Before NHTSA can modify its criteria, it must accept public comments on any proposed change and subject changes to congressional scrutiny. That tends to mean fewer new tests and can mean t …