In addition to conducting high-speed crash tests, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety uses high-resolution video and still photography to document, analyze and publicize the results.
BY RYAN BEENE
WASHINGTON — From its headquarters here, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration writes the rules and regulations that govern automotive safety.
But the prevailing standards for safety in today’s auto marketplace actually are being developed in an office building across the Potomac River in Arlington, Va., and at a campus in the rural village of Ruckersville, Va., about a two-hour drive away.
These are the twin operating bases of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the insurer-funded nonprofit organization that has developed outsize influence on the progress of vehicle safety, accelerating the pace of improvements in crashworthiness and aggressively driving the adoption of crash-prevention technology, while federal regulators play catch-up.
IIHS crash tests in many ways go beyond what’s required by the federal government, and automakers have responded to the results by making substantial engineering changes at a fast clip. IIHS’s access to proprietary insurance claim data allows it to see the greatest areas of unmet need in automobile safety and identify technological solutions to address them. And the group’s Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ accolades have become must-haves for automakers.
“Essentially, what they do to set the bar becomes the de facto standard,” says Sean Kane, a safety researcher and president of Safety Research & Strategies in Rehoboth, Mass. “It becomes the standard, in the absence of any regulations.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Beene is a staff reporter for Automotive News. He covers Volkswagen, Audi, auto safety, and government regulation. He is based in Washington D.C. More»
THE SCIENCE OF SAFETY
“Essentially, what they do to set the bar becomes the de facto standard. It becomes the standard, in the absence of any regulations.”
-- Sean Kane,
Safety Research & Strategies
Evolving standard
That standard keeps evolving. As a private group with access to rich data and a branded rating system that’s routinely cited in marketing materials, IIHS can move quickly to encourage the proliferation of promising safety technologies in the marketplace without fear of pushback from industry lobbyists or other political forces.
In 2012, for example, IIHS added a small-overlap crash test and a new award category, Top Safety Pick+, to recognize vehicles that did well on the test. More than 50 vehicles from the 2012 model year were subjected to the small-overlap crash test; fewer than 10 earned top marks. Many automakers scrambled to improve their performance, and the number of vehicles rated “good” has grown each year since.
A year later, IIHS beefed up the criteria for a TSP+ rating by requiring that vehicles be equipped with crash-prevention systems that met the “basic” rating. Last year, it again raised the bar, requiring vehicles to receive “advanced” or “superior” ratings on the performance of those crash-prevention systems.
Meanwhile, at NHTSA, crash-prevention technology is still under study. The agency completed reports about the safety benefits of crash-prevention systems in 2012 and detailed its refined testing procedures in a report last August. The 2012 study found that the technology would prevent some 200,000 minor injuries, 4,000 serious injuries and 100 deaths annually if equipped on every light vehicle.
Based on those results, the agency took the limited step in January of recommending automatic braking, forward-collision warning and lane-departure warning technologies on new cars, but it stopped short of including them as criteria in its 5-Star Safety Ratings system. Any mandate would be years away.
Crash-test wreckage on display at IIHS’s Vehicle Research Center in Ruckersville, Va. Credit: Ryan Beene
