TAMPA, Fla. — The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has changed the way it evaluates a car’s safety to include how well backseat passengers are protected.
Crashes are no doubt a major issue in the Tampa Bay area. According to Signal 4 Analytics, Florida has seen nearly 650,000 crashes in 2022, and nearly 42,000 of those happened in Hillsborough County, with 207 fatalities.
We’ve all seen the crash dummy footage over the years of cars, SUVs and trucks being slammed into a wall.
Those tests primarily focused on the safety of the driver and front passenger, and while many cars received a good rating in that department, many of them did not rate well at all when it came to the protection of the people in the back seat.
“Advanced seatbelt protections that we often see in the front seat of vehicles these days include two specific technologies: crash tensioners and load limiters,” said David Harkey, the President of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “A crash tensioner activates immediately upon a crash beginning and pulls you in the proper seating position. A load limiter, once the crash is underway, relaxes the belt limiting the amount of force against your chest during the crash.”
Harkey said these same technologies should exist in the backseat.
The IIHS tested 14 small SUVs, and in the original test, all 15 scored a “good” rating.
The institute said those cars demonstrated “robust structures and effective restraints to protect the drivers’ head from contacting the hard surfaces of the interior.”
But, under the new test, only two out of the same 15 vehicles got a “good” rating when it comes to protecting people in the backseat.
“In each vehicle, there was a low risk to each of the dummies, and the restraint in the rear seat did a good job at keeping the dummy away from hard surfaces,” said Harkey of the two that did well.
Those two cars that passed the test are the Ford Escape and the Volvo XC40.
Here’s how the IIHS rated the others:
“The Toyota RAV4 earns an acceptable rating, and the Audi Q3, Nissan Rogue and Subaru Forester are rated marginal. Another nine vehicles — the Buick Encore, Chevrolet Equinox, Honda CR-V, Honda HR-V, Hyundai Tucson, Jeep Compass, Jeep Renegade, Mazda CX-5 and Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross — are rated poor.”
“In all cases, there was an elevated injury risk to the rear dummy. In some vehicles, we saw excessive force on the chest of the dummy. In other vehicles, the dummies had either struck or came close to striking hard surfaces in the vehicle,” said Harkey. “These tests have exposed some shortcomings when it comes to protecting who are seated in the rear seats of our vehicles. We believe the automakers will respond to this challenge and improve rear passenger seat safety.”
