The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has automakers’ engineers in charge of safety back to the drawing board, trying to figure out how to get a passing score for the newly-introduced small overlap crash test, which has vehicles hit the specially-designed obstacle with the area around the front-left headlight, and no more. This puts a heck of a lot of strain on the structure of the car, especially if has not been specifically designed to take this very type of shock.

When it was first introduced, practically all cars fared very poorly, with drivers’ heads almost always missing the airbag, and considerably more intrusion than in the conventional test cars had been subjected to for many years and were passing with flying colors.

Now, most new cars sold in the US are engineered to fare much better than before, but it seems that Toyota forgot to add the extra strengthening to its new RAV4, as it has just been tested and rated “poor” by the IIHS in the very test we’ve spoken about so far.

Apparently, the steering column moved significantly, and the dummy’s head missed the airbag (a common problem), and its foot was also trapped in the contorted metal… This is surprising as the new RAV4 is a much safer vehicle than its predecessor overall, and it did very well in all of the other tests it was subjected to by the IIHS.

Check out the video below to see it all unfold, and see what we’re on about here…

By Andrei Nedelea

VIDEO