Crash test mania: Toyota Camry vs. Yaris
About 50 years ago, a nonprofit organization called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety was founded to conduct research on consumer automotive safety and preventive measures to reduce vehicular crashes and personal injuries that occur in car crashes. Recently the IIHS made news by crash testing a car from the era of its inception, the 1959 Chevy Bel Air, against a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video for the Chevy crash test is readily available, but to sum it up, automobile safety features have come a long way, baby.
Today's video clip is also part of the IIHS crash experiment archives, and we see its test of two recently made Toyota sedans going head-to-head. This frontal offset test shows that the Toyota Yaris is clearly less safe for driver and passenger than the Toyota Camry. Unlike the crash test from yesterday's video featuring Chevy cars from notably different periods, the disparity in safety between these comparably aged cars Toyota makes is intriguingly similar to the Chevy crash test. I know the dollar-saving attributes of a Toyota make it slam-dunk for a lot of car buyers, they still might want to consider the "what if" factor of an automobile crash and which car provides them with the best survival odds.
This is like running a camry into a toyota tundra, and then claiming the camry is less safe, and that while it might be cheaper, you might want to consider that "what if" and get a tundra instead.
Yaris = Daid
And the way that trunk just popped up, looked like there may have been a short that triggered the trunk release.lol
As much as I'd hate to see another classic Chevy get destroyed in a crash test, I'm actually interested to see the results. I'm thinking that it might actually do better than the Yaris, and remember it scored poorly compared to the Malibu despite being a literal tank.lol
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by make_or_break
October 16, 2009 1:49 PM PDT
- Hey CNET...and your finally getting to this now?
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(19 Comments)These tests took place back in late winter/early spring of this year and was reported by the LA Times in the middle of April '09, if not by many others. Guess it didn't go viral, huh? Suppose it's better LATE than NEVER, eh CNET? BTW, it also included two other smack downs: the Smart ForTwo vs its corporate relative, the Mercedes C-class sedan and the Honda Fit vs its bigger sibling, the Honda Accord.
All three offset crashes had the same catastrophic results for the smaller car, which should be no surprise considering the difference in mass between the two corporate sibling cars in each test. The offset crash is the most violent test currently performed by the Insurance Institute...or by anyone else that I'm aware of. Usually when the results of these tests get out in wild (Dateline NBC used to be the willing outlet, though I don't know if this still the case) the affected manufacturers' collective PR departments get all defensive and try to deflect the failure of their cars by citing the unfairness of the test requirements (and yet conversely crow whenever their rides actually do great)...but then a year or so later a newly improved version of the offending vehicle invariably shows up on the doorstep of the IIHS...after the car maker re-engineers the car and runs it through the same test themselves.
Even though the IIHS is basically a tool of the insurance industry, it really does an admirable job of keeping the automakers in check by its willingness to serve up humble pie when it's justly deserved. Aligned, straight-on frontal collisions--long the standard test for head-on crashes--just don't happen that often. We should be thankful that the insurance industry is at least attempting to get reality back into the mix, even if we grouse over the ever increasing insurance rates with each renewal cycle. The Yaris' door latch completely failed; even if the Toyota had side impact and curtain airbags the integrity of the door structure not staying latch would've made any side bags virtually useless. I think that we can expect that Toyota (and Honda and Daimler) will respond accordingly with small cars that will do a fair bit better the next time around.