Remember the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Ford F-150 crash test videos we posted? This is why the crew cab was so much safer than the extended cab.
It’s really rather low tech, according to Automotive News; apparently, they “welded tubular bars to the pickup’s frame and placed them in the front wheel wells, fore and aft of the tire.”
Ford reportedly chose to keep the bars off the extended cab version, and thus making their usefulness oh so clear. What they basically do is absorb energy, add stiffness and also redirect the absorbed energy to other parts of the chassis.
The IIHS will continue to test pickups, and they’ve planned to do the Ram 1500 Crew Cab in September, the Quad Cab in October, the Chevy Silverado in December and the SuperCab version of the F-150 at a later date.
It’s worth noting that another pickup has already been tested, the 2015 Toyota Tundra, but the results have not been made public yet.