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When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released its 2024 Top Safety Picks on Tuesday, what was missing from the list was almost more glaring than what made the winners’ circle.
Of the 203 vehicles the group known as IIHS tested so far this year, only two Detroit brands made the top safety picks list: The Ford Explorer midsize SUV won a Top Safety Pick+ and the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Grand Cherokee L midsize SUVs won a Top Safety Pick in their vehicle classes. No General Motors vehicles won an award.
IIHS has made it harder to earn a Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ award this year by challenging carmakers to offer better protection for back-seat passengers and improve their pedestrian crash avoidance systems. IIHS will test more vehicles, including those in the Detroit Three lineup, throughout the year and the Detroit automakers might earn more of a presence on the winning list later in the year.
IIHS President David Harkey told the Detroit Free Press that the absence of Detroit automakers on the list by comparison with the import brands has been a consistent problem even before the elevated standards.
“We’ve been extremely disappointed that we have not had more domestic top safety picks over the last several years. This has been a challenge,” Harkey told the Free Press. “The vehicles coming from Japan, Germany and Europe have done much better. This year’s big winners were Mazda, they had five Top Safety Pick-plus awards and one Top Safety Pick. Hyundai Motor Group, which includes Genesis and Kia, they had 16 award winning vehicles and six of those were Top Safety Pick-Plus. Toyota and Lexus had 13 winners.”
Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis did not immediately provide a comment for this article.
In an email to the Detroit Free Press, GM’s Senior Manager of Global Public Policy Bill Grotz said the automaker is dedicated to enhancing vehicle safety and performance.
“We continue to invest in advanced safety technologies and work closely with organizations like the IIHS to ensure our vehicles meet the highest safety standards,” Grotz said.
He said GM places safety as the highest priority and it is confident in the safety of its vehicles, “as they undergo rigorous internal testing to meet or exceed all applicable standards set by regulatory authorities, such as NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). We also value the IIHS ratings, and we design our vehicles to perform well in the various IIHS evaluation conditions.”
What it takes to win
The Detroit Three automakers have received some safety recognition. In November, NHTSA announced a list of 2024 model year vehicles for crash testing as part of the agency’s 5-Star Safety Ratings system under its New Car Assessment Program. GM had eight vehicles rated for 5-star safety on that list, Ford had four and Stellantis had four. GM’s Chevy Trax made NHTSA’s award for advanced crash avoidance technology systems verification testing and Ford won that award for its Maverick and Ranger pickups.
IIHS is an independent nonprofit that seeks to reduce deaths, injuries and property damage from car crashes through research and education of consumers, policymakers and safety professionals.
This year, IIHS awarded domestic electric vehicle maker Tesla a Top Safety Pick+ for the Model Y SUV. EV maker Rivian’s R1S large SUV and R1T pickup each won a Top Safety Pick. The Tesla Model 3 has been a consistent award winner in recent years, but IIHS has not completed all its tests on the vehicle yet, so it is possible it could qualify later in the year as IIHS completes the tests, IIHS spokesman Joe Young said.
For those vehicles that don’t make the list, it does not necessarily mean they are unsafe, Harkey said. The vehicles that achieve awards are simply “the best of the best” and the safest in that vehicle’s class.
Still, for the last half dozen years since Harkey has run IIHS, it has been frustrating to not see a stronger showing for GM, Ford and Stellantis vehicles, he said. Stellantis makes Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Ram and Fiat brands.
“We meet with their safety people all the time and we talk through their issues,” Harkey said. “We do that with every automaker. So nothing we do is a surprise to them. They meet with our team all the time, they understand what needs to be done and what needs to be changed. But it seems to be a slower process for our domestic automakers than it does for foreign automakers.”
IIHS started its tests and Top Safety Picks in 1995. Of the 203 models it has rated for the 2024 list, 71 qualified for 2024 awards. Of those, 22 earned Top Safety Pick+ and 49 earned Top Safety Pick, Harkey said. The institute tested some late last year and others early this year.
The IIHS rates a vehicle as either: Good, acceptable, marginal and poor on a variety of safety tests. To win a Top Safety Pick award from a crash standpoint, Harkey said a vehicle must pass the following:
- Earn a good rating in two front crash tests and one side crash test. The side crash tests include front seat and rear seat driver-side dummies, which are two smaller female dummies because they better indicate if a real person would slip under the side air bag upon impact rather than a bigger-sized male dummy.
- The vehicle must also earn a good or acceptable rating in the pedestrian front-crash prevention technology test for daytime and nighttime driving.
- Finally, it has to have a good or acceptable rating of its headlights on all trim levels.
To win the Top Safety Pick+ award, a vehicle must meet all of the criteria for a Top Safety Pick, plus have a good or acceptable rating in the updated moderate overlap front-crash test. That is a test that includes the driver dummy and a dummy in the rear seat behind the driver. The front driver dummy is a male and the rear is a smaller female about the size of a 12-year-old child because in real life it is often a child in that rear seat, Harkey said.
Harkey said IIHS considers the following criteria to determine the rating:
- Structure: How well the occupant compartment remains intact and leaves “survivable space” in the vehicle.
- Restraint systems: How well did the seat belts and the technology in seat belts work? Did the air bags fire correctly and prevent a dummy from hitting a hard object in the vehicle?
- Measurements: IIHS measures the sensors on a dummy to determine the force of impact on the chest, neck or head to assess the potential for injury.
This year’s changes
Last year’s biggest change was the replacement of the original side crash test with an updated version that uses aheavier barrier traveling at a higher speed, Young said. An acceptable or good rating was enough last year to win a Top Safety Pick. But for this year, a good rating is required in that test to win either award.
Additionally, vehicles now need an acceptable or good rating in a revised version of the pedestrian front crash prevention evaluation that includes nighttime. Last year, vehicles could earn a Top Safety Pick regardless of whether it could detect and avoid pedestrians in the dark.
An even bigger change for 2024 is the updated moderate front overlap test that now places a small dummy in the rear seat. A vehicle needs an acceptable or good rating in the updated evaluation to get the Top Safety Pick+ award.
The changes to the 2024 award criteria are designed to push automakers to pursue higher levels of safety, Harkey said.
In last year’s study, the new crash test for back-seat passenger safety in some midsize luxury SUVs resulted in Lincoln ranking with Mercedes and Volvo for being the best while the Cadillac XT6 was the only vehicle in the category to earn a “poor” score among eight vehicles tested because of the potential for head, neck and chest injuries.
How Ford and Chevy has rated so far …
IIHS tested more than a dozen of GM’s vehicles for this year’s list, Harkey said. It has more GM vehicles to test such as the Buick Encore, so that vehicle has not been eliminated as a potential award winner once IIHS completes all its tests, he said.
“GM did not nominate it and that’s one reason everything has not been done on it so far,” Harkey said, noting that if an automaker nominates a vehicle it gets priority in testing. “We’ll get to it later in the year. We’ll test vehicles throughout the year and are constantly updating the list.”
But Harkey said IIHS tested nine Chevorlet vehicles. The Chevrolet Equinox, for example, failed due to a poor rating on headlights, he said. The light-duty Chevrolet Silverado pickup “only got an acceptable rating in our side crash test and it has poor headlights,” Harkey said.
“We tested more than a dozen (GM) vehicles. Unfortunately, we did not have any GM vehicles that qualified for one of our two awards this year.” Harkey said. “This is not the first year where this has been an issue. It’s been something for a few years now where we have very few GM vehicles, Stellantis vehicles and Ford vehicles on the list.”
At Ford, he said the F-150 pickup did well in several tests, but it has not yet been tested for pedestrian front crash protection or headlights.
“From a crash worthiness standpoint, the F-150 is doing really well for those tests, but from a crash prevention standpoint, we have not run the tests for pedestrian front crash prevention and headlights,” Harkey said.
Detroit not implementing safety ‘at the same rate’ as imports
IIHS has held more frequent and in-depth conversations with Ford, Stellantis and GM, “to get them to more aggressively and more systematically implement some of these design intervention and technology interventions into their fleets. They’re not doing it at the same rate as the other automakers,” Harkey said.
That’s despite Detroit’s emphasis on safety. For example, the 2014 ignition switch crisis at GM resulted in a recall of some 30 million small cars worldwide and was connected to at least 124 deaths and 275 injuries. GM leaders implemented a number of changes following the crisis to ensure vehicle safety so that nothing like that would be repeated. GM started the Speak Up For Safety program several years ago to encourage all employees, dealers and suppliers to submit safety concerns to the field investigation team.
Last fall, GM held a weeklong, company-wide campaign as part of GM’s Global Safety Week to raise safety awareness. It was the 10th anniversary of the campaign with the theme being, “Looking Back to Look Ahead.” That meant reflect on the past decade’s accomplishments in safety, while preparing for the safer future, GM said in a statement.
At Ford, product quality has been an ongoing challenge since before CEO Jim Farley took the helm in October 2022, with billions of dollars in recall and warranty costs. Farley vowed to confront the issue by hiring a new quality team, implementing new protocols and stopping production when necessary.
Still, Harkey said other automakers are “able to figure out for Model A in their fleet how to design a better vehicle and put better technology in it and then implement it across the entire lineup and I don’t know why. We have to continue to have these conversations with (the Detroit Three) and get them to engage more.”
More:Thousands of Ford owners may be driving a ‘ticking time bomb’ with flawed air bag repairs
More:Ford halted shipments of 2024 F-150 Lightning due to headlight issues
As for consumers, Harkey said to study IIHS’s list and purchase “as much safety as you can afford.”
The full list of winners and the criteria can be seen at www.iihs.org.
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
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