After the year of the pandemic, lockdowns, school & business closures, and just plain yuck, people are ready to get away on vacation and have some fun. With such pent-up demand for holiday activities, this summer may shatter travel records! According to AAA, more than 47 million Americans traveled over July 4th weekend! A whopping 91% of travelers reached their destination by car. With so many people taking to the roadways, it might be a good idea to be sure your car will protect you if you are involved in a crash.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, NHTSA for short, is a terrific place to start. NHTSA crash tests many popular makes and models. A 5-star rating is assigned – making it easy to compare each vehicle’s overall performance and how it fared on frontal crash tests, side impacts, and roll over resistance. The NHTSA website also provides information about safety equipment, recalls, complaints and government investigations. You can visit their website and simply type in a vehicle’s make and model to get all of this information in an easily understandable format: NHTSA ratings
Taking the safety and crash tests to a higher standard, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or “IIHS”, tests cars in a more demanding manner. The IIHS designs its tests to more closely simulate real world crashes. They also evaluate safety equipment performance, crash avoidance technology, child safety seat anchor ease of use, and a myriad of other safety items most people use when operating their vehicles. The IIHS performance ratings for each test are also easy to understand:
- Good (the best possible score)
- Acceptable
- Marginal
- Poor
Vehicles that do particularly well receive an IIHS Top Safety Pick+ designation…these are the vehicles you should be looking to purchase because they do the best at avoiding collisions, but if one occurs, they provide the best measure of safety to the occupants. You can find all if the details on their website: https://www.iihs.org/ratings
As a law firm that represents people who have been injured in car crashes, as well as the families of those who have died in them, we can tell you that vehicle crashes can be life altering. By using these readily available resources, you can improve your chances of walking away from a crash, or perhaps avoid one altogether.
