Safety Groups Blasts Toyota For ‘Poor’ Camry And Prius V Crash Test Performance
 

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Hmmm, ever notice how the shoulder belt is pretty much useless in all these types of crashes...

This new test involves an extraordinarily severe crash. The car is going 40 mph. The barrier does not deform at all, making it roughly like a head on with another vehicle of equal mass also going 40 mph. The barrier overlaps only the left 25% of the car, so all the kinetic energy is being concentrated into a very small area - for mid-sized cars, an area appx 15" wide. If the car isn't designed for this kind of crash, it'll be hard to perform well. I guess the engineers will have to design the next generation of cars for this test, if it becomes a standard test.

insurance institute for highway safety.. Yeah they arent biased or anything..

I agree that it's a tough test but it's the one I want my car to pass if I'm spending for something new.

As it is, I feel pretty good about the older Mercedes-Benz cars I'm driving.

I hope they make it a standard test. I'm handling a three person fatality accident, right now, with the fourth critically injured. It was a head-on but slightly offset impact between a pickup and Chrysler minivan - very similar to this test. The kid driving the pickup truck walked away. Three generations of a wonderful family died at the scene.

Enough people get killed in accidents like this that cars should be built for them. Cars perform extremely well for the testing done now, but that just gives a false sense of security because so many accidents happen outside of the testing parameters. Some cars do build for it already, but you have to be an industry insider to know which is which. Too many careful families research the published safety data, buy a five star rated vehicle, and go away unaware that they're not as well protected as they thought.

It looks like a more real-world test than what they previously used. Good.