Families carry precious cargo in the back seat, but those rear seat passengers are not well protected, new crash tests show.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) put five top-selling small cars through new tests called moderate overlap frontal crashes. None of the cars got good ratings, and three out of five got poor ratings because of risks in the back seats.
All five cars previously had earned top ratings. However, the 2022-23 Kia Forte, Nissan Sentra and Subaru Crosstrek were all downgraded to “poor” overall. The 2023 Toyota Corolla and 2022-23 Honda Civic earned “acceptable” ratings.
In the rigorous test, the car travels 40 miles an hour and slams the driver’s front portion head-on into a wall.
The reason for the troubling ratings is what happened to the small dummy, the size of a small woman or 12-year-old child, in the rear seat. The issue is what’s called submarining.
“Submarining occurs when the lap belt slides up over the pelvis and onto the abdominal region,” said IIHS’s David Harkey. “This can result in more severe internal injuries.”
In the cars that earned a “poor” rating, there was shown to be an elevated risk of injury to the head, neck, and chest of the rear dummy.
Their research has shown restraint technology to protect front seat passengers well, so IIHS encourages carmakers to make changes so back seat passengers are just as safe.
Despite the crash tests, IIHS says the back seat is still the safest place in the car for a child, so airbags do not injure them.
IIHS plans to test more models in the future. Previous tests of some family SUVs showed similar issues with back seat passengers and seat belt movement.