Vehicle Passive Safety - I am a Wimp

[racer_d]

It is a curiosity... IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) is a private "company" that is funded by insurance companies. It could be that in the overl cost of crashing cars, testing a car that sells 10-15,000 year isn't as "important" as the 250,000 civics, accords, camrys and F-150 pickups that are sold every year.

Oh, and on USA Today I saw an article from the IIHS telling us "small cars are not as safe as big cars"... duh, really? Once again, genius at work...

I am not sure why NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Agency) doesn't publish data, considering they are run by the DOT and the DOT requires "federalization" tests to be made before a vehicle can be sold here. I am not sure how that process works - ie Porsche must submit "X" number of various models for destruction or if Porsche can supply the data they receive from the German TUV rating agency in lieu of actual US Tests.

Then again, maybe "big brother" wants all Porsche owners to drive unsafe cars...

[Cloudsurfer]

An automaker cannot sell a car here unless it is federalized, and last I knew, TUV tests cannot be substituted for DOT tests (as obscene as that is). Also of note, the DOT considers manual and automatic cars different models in terms of federalization, and this is why you cannot buy a manual E or S class, A8, or other cars which are commonly found in manual form in Europe here. To their credit, BMW goes to great lengths to bring us manual 5 series cars.

Porsche's cars get tested like everyone else's, perhaps not by the IIHS for reasons discussed above, but you can be damn sure the cars are federalized. As to why you can't find the results, that is a bit puzzling.

Patrick