Which cars are safer?(Cars 2001)(Directory)

Safety is a major concern for most car buyers. The problem is, when you try to compare vehicles in terms of safety, you have to pull together and make sense of a lot of disparate pieces of information. In addition to CONSUMER REPORTS' performance tests, for instance, crash tests of many vehicles are conducted by two separate organizations: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Which cars are safer? There's no one answer that covers all situations. Your safety on the road depends on many factors, including the vehicle's design, driver behavior, road conditions, weather, and the actions of other motorists. There are no guarantees; even the most careful driver can't control all of these variables.

One critical variable people do have control over is which vehicle they choose to drive--the starting point of every driving experience. There can be significant differences from one vehicle to the next. In this report, we evaluate vehicle safety in terms of two broad areas: accident avoidance and crash protection. And we introduce the new CR Safety Assessment, which integrates the key information from both our performance tests for accident avoidance and the various crash tests, and evaluates 79 of the most popular vehicles in terms of overall safety.

ACCIDENT AVOIDANCE

A vehicle's ability to help keep you out of an accident can be just as important as its ability to protect you in a crash. For every accident, there are numerous "near misses" that statistics don't reflect. Several factors contribute to a vehicle's accident-avoidance capability, with the two most important being braking and emergency handling.

Braking. A vehicle's braking system has to stop the vehicle in as short a distance as possible and keep the vehicle under control and on a straight path. Our tests measure braking performance on both dry and wet pavement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a vehicle's antilock braking system (ABS).

Emergency handling. The more controllable and secure a vehicle is when pressed to its handling limits, the better able you'll be to avoid an accident by steering around an obstacle without losing control. We rate emergency handling on the basis of three tests. In one, we perform a series of double-lane-change maneuvers that simulate a driver trying to steer around an obstacle on the road. In the other tests, vehicles are pushed to their cornering limits around our skidpad and our handling course.