Driving a vehicle that earns a good rating in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) driver-side small overlap front crash test reduces your risk of dying in a crash, new research has shown.
A driver in a good-rated vehicle is 12 percent less likely than a driver in a poor-rated one to be killed in a frontal crash, the IIHS study found.
“The numbers confirm that strong performance in the Institute’s small overlap front crash test translates into big reductions in fatality risk,” said Eric Teoh, director of statistical services at IIHS and one of the study’s authors.
IIHS added the driver-side small overlap front crash test to its battery of crash evaluations in 2012, targeting fatal crashes that still occurred even though virtually all vehicles were earning good ratings in the long-running moderate overlap test.
Initially only about ten percent of the vehicles the Institute tested earned a good rating, while 40 percent were rated poor. Today, virtually every vehicle tested earns a good rating.
