Many Cars Flunk This Particular Crash Test - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.

Car advertisements are everywhere, on TV, billboards, and magazines. Many of the ads emphasize safety features. However, a new crash test found that few luxury vehicles earn a good or acceptable grade in small overlap frontal collisions.

The test performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety used 11 higher end, midsized vehicle models and discovered that 8 of those cars received marginal or poor grades. The problem surprisingly doesn’t involve head-on crashes, but instead has to do with smaller overlap collisions.
“In the test, 25 percent of a car's front end on the driver side strikes a 5-foot-tall rigid barrier at 40 mph. A 50th percentile male dummy is belted in the driver seat.”

The Volvo S60 and the Acura TL were the only two vehicles to receive a “Good” rating, while the Infiniti G model passed with an “Acceptable” grade.

According to a press release by the Institute, “Manufacturers recognize that this crash mode poses a significant risk to their customers and have indicated they plan structural and restraint changes to improve protection in small overlap frontal crashes.”