The IIHS tested three American pony cars for crash safety but none, including the new Ford Mustang, earns its top safety score.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently tested the most prominent sports coupes sold there: the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, and Dodge Challenger. The resulting crashes revealed that all three failed to achieve the highest rating.
Think of the IIHS as being America’s ANCAP equivalent, but instead of the typical 1-5 star rating system, the highest score they can award is called Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+.
Of the three tested pony cars, the Ford Mustang came the nearest to scoring Top Safety Pick, but ultimately fell short. You may think that that isn’t all that shocking, but consider that the IIHS had tested 65 other 2016 models alone that achieved either of those top scoring ranks.
On the front-overlap test that’s analogous to ANCAP’s frontal offset test, the Dodge Challenger scored the lowest with a ‘marginal’ rating with a “high likelihood” of serious leg injury and “limited survival space for the driver”. The Mustang took an ‘acceptable’ rating on the same test.
On other crash test metrics, the Mustang fared well, especially against the other two sports coupes, and would likely have taken the Top Safety Pick rating had it done better in the frontal impact tests.
