IIHS Removes Technical Details from Crash Tests

You can't learn from crash tests when the tester makes you the dummy
You can’t learn from crash tests when the tester makes you the dummy

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is one of my favorite resources for crash testing data on vehicle sold in the United States. Frankly, it’s the only real option out there aside from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and it’s helpful to have both present, since their tests, while simlar, aren’t exactly the same, and they complement each other wonderfully. However, the IIHS has unfortunately become a lot less useful with the latest redesign to their website, as they chose to quietly remove the technical details from their crash tests. I could not find any mention of the change on the IIHS website, and there does not appear to be any other way of accessing the information aside from by receiving it on a case-by-case basis from the IIHS.

When the IIHS removes specifications from crash tests, we all lose

This is unfortunate. What is left is the report-card system of “Good, Acceptable, Marginable, Poor” that offers little more than a top level summary of crash test performance. However, the depth of information formerly present that allowed us to draw comparisons between levels of protection is gone. Previous articles on the Car Crash Detective comparing, for example, the levels of side impact intrusion resistance across SUVs can no longer be written using IIHS data, as they’ve hidden the very data that lets you know which vehicles were best able to keep 3,400 lbs of steel and plastic from crushing you when ramming into your driver’s side door.

Are there any other resources to find technical crash test details?

Yes indeed; the NHTSA, which is government funded and not a private institution like the IIHS, continues to freely distribute full crash test reports (which the IIHS never has) including all available statistical details on how vehicles faired in crash tests. The problem is that the NHTSA data is more difficult to pull as it requires combing through each report (after downloading them one by one) to find the relevant information. And as noted earlier, the IIHS and NHTSA don’t run exactly the same crash tests, which means you’d only be able to compare NHTSA data to NHTSA data and not to IIHS data, and vice-versa.

Privatization of public safety information is detrimental to us all

This is one of the many downsides of privatization. The information the IIHS collects is useful to the public, but because it’s in the hands of a private company, they are free to hide it as they wish, regardless of the benefits it offers to public safety.

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