Small cars performed poorly in a new round of insurance industry crash testing, with the four-door Mini Cooper Countryman receiving the only good rating of 12 cars evaluated.
Meanwhile, the lithium ion electric batteries of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid and Nissan Leaf electric vehicle survived during their first Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tests with no problems reported.
The cars were evaluated using the institute’s small overlap front crash test.
The test, in use since 2012, examines how well vehicles handle 40-mph collisions in which there is 25 percent frontal overlap with a 5-foot-tall rigid barrier on the driver’s side.
