Most Midsize SUVs Fall Short in New Crash Test

Few people buy a midsize SUV with plans to leave the rear seats empty most of the time. Midsize SUVs are America’s family haulers of choice. That means, for many drivers, the safety of rear-seat passengers is paramount.

With that in mind, one of America’s two crash-testing agencies has changed one of its crash tests to include an evaluation of rear-seat safety. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has released the first round of results from its new test. They’re not encouraging.

Related: IIHS Gives Fewer Safety Awards After Toughening Crash Tests

Of 13 midsize SUVs tested, only four earned top ratings.

America’s Two Crash-Testing Agencies

Two organizations perform crash tests on nearly every car for sale in the United States.

One is the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It was not involved in this round of tests.

The other is a safety lab funded by insurance companies. 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 – the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). It conducts its own battery of tests.

Both sets of crash-test results are important, and car shoppers should consider both. But, in the automotive industry, the IIHS has a reputation as a tough grader.

When NHTSA wants to change its test, it must subject every proposed change to a public comment period and possible congressional scrutiny. Lobbyists try to soften every change.

When IIHS wants to make a test harder, they make the test harder. Their bosses – your insurance company – want them to be as tough as possible. So IIHS tests tend to be more extensive, change often, and are harder for automakers to ace.

A Child-Size Dummy

The big change this time? A kid in the back. The institute explains, “The new test incorporates a Hybrid III dummy representing a small woman or 12-year-old child positioned in the second row behind the driver and uses specific metrics that focus on the injuries most frequently seen in rear-seat occupants.”

Otherwise, it’s the same moderate overlap front crash test the institute has run for several years. It sends a vehicle traveling 40 mph into a barrier with a deformable aluminum face. “The forces in the test are similar to those that would result from a frontal offset crash between two vehicles of the same weight, each going just under 40 mph,” IIHS says.

The agency rates vehicles as Good, Acceptable, Marginal, or Poor based on the likelihood of injuries to the driver and, now, second-row passenger.

Drivers Safer Than Rear Seat Passengers

“All these vehicles provide excellent protection for the driver,” said IIHS President David Harkey, “but only a handful extend that level of safety to the back seat.”

Almost every SUV tested aced the test when it came to protecting the driver. Most earned the highest possible score across all five measures of driver protection.

Only one – the Ford Mustang Mach-E earned perfect scores for protecting rear-seat passengers from all three types of injury measured (head and neck, chest, and thigh).

But that shows that the highest score is possible.

IIHS safety experts see this as an opportunity.

“Zeroing in on weaknesses in rear seat safety is an opportunity to make big gains in a short time, since solutions that are already proven to work in the front can successfully be adapted for the rear,” said IIHS Senior Research Engineer Marcy Edwards, who led the development of the updated test.

The Results