- The 2025 Kia Sorento missed the IIHS Top Safety Pick+ despite rear seat belt upgrades.
- Updated headlights helped improve the 2024 Acura ZDX’s safety rating, but it still fell short.
- The 2025 Nissan Altima received a ‘Poor’ rating in the IIHS’s updated side crash tests.
The 2025 Kia Sorento has managed to snag a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) but fell just short of the top accolade—a near miss it shares with the 2025 Nissan Altima, 2024 Acura ZDX, and 2024 Honda Prologue. In a market where safety ratings are increasingly scrutinized, this is a sting that Kia and its competitors would rather have avoided.
Crash tests conducted by the IIHS are frequently updated to push car manufacturers to make their new models safer. Recently, the moderate overlap front test was updated, and in July, Kia updated the rear seat belts in the 2025 Sorento in an attempt to achieve a better score. It fell short, getting a marginal rating as the lap belt moved from the pelvis to the abdomen, and there was an unacceptable risk of injury to the rear occupant’s head or neck.
Read: Kia’s Common-Sense 2025 Sorento Gets Some EV9 Pizzazz
Despite only getting a marginal rating in this test, the Sorento did enough to get a Top Safety Pick rating scoring ‘Good’ in four tests and ‘Acceptable’ in another two tests. The ZDX, Prologue, and Altima, did not perform so well.
In the case of the 2025 Nissan Altima, it it too received a “Marginal” rating in the revamped moderate overlap front test but fared even worse in other assessment. The Altima stumbled to a “Poor” rating in the updated side test and managed only a “Marginal” for its front crash prevention system
The closely related Acura ZDX and Honda Prologue received a ‘Good’ rating in the new moderate overlap front test. However, they only received ‘Acceptable’ ratings in the front prevention pedestrian system. Interestingly, the Prologues headlights only received an ‘Acceptable’ rating while the ZDX got a ‘Good.’ This is because Acura recently updated the headlights fitted as standard to the ZDX, as the lights on vehicles produced before September were rated as ‘Poor.’
In the end, none of these four vehicles performed strongly enough across the board to qualify for the 2024 Top Safety Pick+ award.
