The Most Dangerous Cars in America

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is the non-profit research organization that performs tests on hundreds of vehicle models in the country with the goal of letting us and the car industry know where there is room for improvement. So far in 2015 twenty vehicles have received a poor rating in one or more of their tests and Wall Street 24/7 is providing the details.

The vehicles they test are graded on head and restraint safety, as well as how they perform in front, side, and rollover crashes, and they also now have created what they refer to as a small overlap frontal test. What exactly is that? This is 24/7's explanation:

The small overlap front test is meant to measure what will happen to a vehicle in a frontal collision when only a small part of the left front collides with either another vehicle or a non-moving object. Such a crash can occur when two vehicles approaching each other swerve to miss but still strike each other. Or it can occur when a vehicle careens off a road and strikes a tree or pole on the left front of the car. In these crashes, airbag systems can sometimes operate at less than optimal efficiency because most front-end crash protection is concentrated on the middle part of the vehicle. A crash on the outer edge can result in significant intrusion, meaning that parts of the car intruding on the driver’s space."

According to the IIHS this type of accident causes one-quarter of all injuries and deaths in front-end crashes. Most automakers have made modifications to their vehicles to make them safer in these kinds of crashes, but as always, some vehicles are just designed and made better than others.