A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the bigger the car they buy, the safer they will be. This attitude is not entirely unwarranted, but it doesn’t hold true across the whole spectrum. Just because the vehicle is big doesn’t mean that you’ll be okay in it. Having a safe car is often important, not only to survival, but to avoiding paying high car insurance premiums. One of the biggest factors in deciding your premium comes down to how likely a driver of your type of car is to file a car insurance claim. The safer the car, the lesser the risk, so getting a safe car can both save your life and save your money.
The new Safe Autos for Everyone Program tells which cars are the safer ones for each type of vehicle, so if you are dead set on that SUV, you can at least know which is the best one to buy for safety. That doesn’t mean that your car insurance company will like you buying an SUV, but it is a step in the right direction.
The cars which have so far gotten on the list of safest car are:
* Chevrolet Impala 4-DR
* Ford Windstar
* Honda Civic 4-DR
* Lincoln LS
* Toyota Sienna
* Volkswagen Jetta 4-DR
* Volkswagen Passat
* Volvo S80
The way that these cars got onto the list is because they did good in crash tests. Crash tests are done by either the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which does the government tests, or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which does the tests which are used by much of the car insurance industry. Some of the cars that do the best in these tests are the ones that are bigger and more heavy. One thing you might want to consider, though, when shopping for a car is that not all cars are tested. More expensive cars that sell less don’t usually go through these crash tests.
Both of the organizations that perform the crash tests will restrict their testing to the cars that are considered to be more popular. This is because of the cost and the time that goes into crash testing, so they don’t have the resources to do crash tests on every car, even though it would be ideal. It would be better if the makers of the cars could pay them to perform the crash tests so that every car could be tested, but the makers choose not to do that and for this reason some cars aren’t held accountable for their lack of safety or praised for their possession of it.
A car doesn’t have to do perfect to be considered good and get good rates for car insurance premiums. Another great way to go is to get a rating of acceptable on the IIHS crash tests. This is still okay, but considering that most of the popular cars out on the market can score a good, even the ones considered normally dangerous, I wouldn’t accept an acceptable if I were you.
If a car gets at least for stars on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s front impact, and at least three stars on the side impact, that’s good, too, because it means the possibility of injury is less than one sixth. It should also get at least three stars on the roll over tests, which means there is less than a third likelihood of a roll over.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
