In what’s become article of an anniversary tradition, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has ratcheted up requirements for 2019 on its two affecting crashworthiness awards: Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick Plus. Added than 50 models now accommodated either bar in IIHS’ aboriginal appear annular of testing, but added are adequate to appear over the abutting 12 months. That compares to the 80-plus nameplates that becoming the designations for the 2018 awards.
Eight IIHS evaluations actuate accolade eligibility. With four accessible grades — good, acceptable, bordering or poor — bristles of them admeasurement structural crashworthiness, one measures whiplash aegis and addition measures caliginosity headlight effectiveness. The final analysis evaluates automated emergency braking systems, but its after-effects acquire a abstracted allocation scale: superior, advanced, basal or none.
To get a Top Safety Pick for 2019, a car needs adequate or adequate array in both the headlight appraisal and passenger-side small-overlap blast test; avant-garde or above grades for automated braking; and adequate array in the bristles actual tests. Last year, array for passenger-side baby overlap — IIHS’ newest test, which simulates a bang blow with an article on the front-passenger ancillary of the car — weren’t allotment of the Top Safety Pick award.
To get the college award, Top Safety Pick Plus, a car needs above or avant-garde grades in automated braking and adequate array on all added evaluations. A year ago, Top Safety Pick Plus cars could skate by with an adequate account in the passenger-side baby overlap test.
Cars can still accommodated the headlight and automated braking array with alternative accessories — and they generally do, area a top account requires a college trim akin or alternative amalgamation that analogously few examples have. Indeed, a Cars.com analysis in 2017 begin that out of about 100 cars that becoming Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick Plus designations, aloof 13 agitated the acumen beyond all trim levels.
That appears to be an abatement trend. IIHS acclaimed this year that best accolade winners still alone authorize with alternative systems to bolster their headlight or automated emergency braking scores, but best additionally now acquire standard automatic braking — a technology one abstraction found reduces injury-causing rear-end crashes by some 40 percent. The all-inclusive majority of automakers acquire pledged to accomplish such braking systems accepted by 2022.
Of the group, seven cars — the BMW X2, Genesis G70 and G90, Honda Insight and Pilot, Mercedes-Benz C-Class auto and Subaru Forester — get their corresponding awards with no strings attached. That is to say that alike their abject models acquire the accessories all-important to attain Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick Plus status.
IIHS stipulates that the awards administer to both amalgam and constituent amalgam versions of the Ioniq and Niro, as able-bodied as amalgam versions of the Honda Accord, Hyundai Sonata, Kia Optima and Lexus ES, and those of the Toyota Avalon, Camry and Highlander. For any awardees with plug-in hybrid versions — those actuality the Sonata and Optima, as able-bodied as the BMW 5 Series, Chrysler Pacifica, Mercedes C-Class and GLC-Class, Mitsubishi Outlander and Subaru Crosstrek — the ratings don’t alteration over. Unlike with hybrids, IIHS requires added affidavit from automakers to extend ratings to constituent amalgam variants, agent Russ Rader told Cars.com. The bureau is apprehension such advice on those cars. Rader added that ratings do not extend to absolutely electric versions of cars on the list, as in this case the Hyundai Kona Electric and Kia Soul EV.
Note, as well, that abstracted blast structures for anatomy appearance variants — like a auto nameplate with auto or convertible versions — beggarly IIHS awards don’t apply unless those variants are additionally evaluated and canyon muster, as was the case for the Impreza auto and hatchback.
Addition wrinkle: Some 2019 models — the Mini Cooper, for archetype — acquire Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick Plus designations for 2018 but not 2019, admitting the credible alignment in year. That’s because the agency’s awards go by calendar year, not archetypal year. IIHS evaluated several 2019 models for its 2018 awards, and the aforementioned is all-but-assured for aboriginal 2020 models evaluated over the abutting 12 months. A new 2020 archetypal ability get the 2019 award, but that doesn’t beggarly it will get the 2020 award.
Confused? We don’t accusation you. Rader accepted the timing could baffle some consumers.
“We accede that it can be confusing,” Rader declared in an email to Cars.com.
Stay acquainted for added evaluations and awards as the year progresses.