Tag Archives: iihs

IIHS Restores Technical Crash Test Data

Transparency is important, whether in glasses or in technical data regarding crash tests.

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.

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.

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.