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2014 Toyota RAV4 IIHS Crash Test

The IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) looked at Europe’s NCAP safety tests and said “This is crazy! Nobody will crash like that...”, so they came up with front overlapping impacts.
Toyota Rav4 Small Overlap Crash 1 photo
Photo: screenshot from Youtube
And you know what? They are right. Unlike crash test dummies, experienced drivers will try to avoid an impact and sometimes this ends up in an overlap front crash, in which one of the vehicle’s frontal sides slightly overlaps with the object it’s gonna crash into.

You will say “Meh, so what? Means that he avoided a hard frontal impact.”. Well, let me go all James May over you and ask to remember the physics class. Pressure is formed by an amount of force over a certain surface. So having the same force applied to a smaller surface means that the pressure will be higher. Returning to the car crashes now, you will understand that if a car receives a full frontal hit at 40 mph (64 km/h) won’t be the same as the same hit applied only to a small section of its front side.

This kind of tests have demolished lots of highscore safety test for many automakers. The 2013 Toyota RAV4 model scored “Good” - which is like a 5-star Euro NCAP grade - in all tests but the small overlap one, where it got a “Poor” label. We hope that Toyota and every other automaker out there will learn from these tests and improve safety for these kind of impacts, as they are devastating. See why in the video bellow.

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