At its core, the Car Crash Detective is an advocacy site. Nearly every post falls into one (or both) of two categories: identifying best practices and providing case studies of what occurs when best practices aren’t followed (due to a lack of knowledge, a lack of interest, or the vagaries of fate). To that end, one of the three elements of best practices for safe road use involves vehicular safety (the other two are driver behavior and road infrastructure). And when one of the two major testing bodies in the United States for vehicular crash testing (the other being the NHTSA) decides to hide technical information related to their decisions on crashworthiness, that’s kind of a big deal. And that’s just what the IIHS did in 2019. And when they did, I immediately contacted them about the inherent problems in this issue. They responded by noting that they were continually improving their site and that my feedback would be taken into consideration. That wasn’t good enough, and I noted the disservice they were doing to the general US population and all individuals interested in crashworthiness and the march toward safer vehicles.
Fortunately, after some deliberation, they appear to have listened. Later in 2019, the IIHS decided to republish technical information related to their crash tests. They still don’t provide nearly as much information as the NHTSA, which prints a full technical report related to each crash, filled with hundreds of pages of data, charts, and large color photographs detailing thousands of elements of each test–those are the benefits you get from governmental organizations vs private ones, and the NHTSA is a public institution while the IIHS is literally funded by car insurance companies. However, any information helps us make better decisions, and I’m happy to see the IIHS take a step toward transparency and away from a dumbing down of information provided to the public.
If you find my information on best practices in car and car seat safety helpful, you can buy my books here or do your shopping through this Amazon link. Canadians can shop here for Canadian purchases. It costs nothing extra to do so, but when you shop through my links, a small portion of your purchase, regardless of what you buy, will go toward the maintenance of The Car Crash Detective.