66 vehicles earn the IIHS Top Safety Pick award
Sixty-six vehicles earn the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s TOP SAFETY PICK award for 2011, including 40 cars, 25 SUVs, and a minivan. TOP SAFETY PICK recognizes vehicles that do the best job of protecting people in front, side, rollover, and rear crashes based on fine ratings in Institute tests. Winners also must have available electronic stability control, a crash avoidance feature that considerably reduces crash risk. At the beginning of the 2010 model year, only twenty seven vehicles qualified for the award, but the number grew to 58 as car manufacturers reworked existing designs and introduced new models. Now another 10 vehicles join the winners’ catalog for 2011. Two discontinued models drop off. Front-runners: Hyundai i30/Kia and Volkswagen/Audi each have 9 winners for 2011. Next in line with 8 awards apiece are General Motors, Ford/Lincoln, and Toyota/Lexus/Scion. Subaru is the only manufacturer with a winner in all the vehicle classes in which it competes. Subaru earns 5 awards for 2011.
The redesigned Volkswagen Touareg is the only large SUV to earn TOP SAFETY PICK for next year. The Institute doesn’t normally evaluate SUVs this large, but Volkswagen requested crash tests to show the Touareg’s crashworthiness. None of the small pickups the Institute has evaluated qualified for this year’s award, and large pickups haven’t yet been tested. Hyundai is a case in point. The Tucson and the little SUV’s twin, the Kia Sportage, earned a poor rating for roof strength in 2009, with the weakest roof among all of the little SUVs evaluated that year. A redesign helped the 2011 models secure a good rating and TOP SAFETY PICK. Hyundai also improved the top on another SUV, the midsize Santa Fe, and redesigned the Sonata, a midsize car that had earned a marginal roof rating the first time around.