Those crash test scores you read about are more than a little misleading. You read, “highest possible” or “Five stars” — and conclude, reasonably, that the car in question must be pretty safe.
Well, maybe it is. But maybe it’s not.
For example, I read news coverage the other day about the crash test performance of the new Smart ForTwo micro-car. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), which along with the federal government is the main source for the crash test rankings you see advertised and talked about on the news, awarded the Smart car the highest-possible score — “good” — for crashworthiness in frontal and side-impact collisions.
Sounds good, right?
The problem, though, is that the Smart car’s “good” performance is only relative to other cars of its type. So while the Smart car is about as good as it gets for a micro-sized car, it’s performance is not nearly as good as the performance of a mid-sized or full-size car — even if the mid-sized or full-sized car has a lower ranking (or fewer “stars”) relative to other cars in its segment.
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