June 16, 2017—A new study conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) shows that, for the first time in years, Volvo vehicles do not rank high in real-world crash safety data, according to Torque News.
Volvo models have scored well on crash testing for many years, but real-world crash test data is also taken from police reports. Police conduct extensive investigations when a fatality occurs. In addition to the contributing factors in the crash, police carefully record the make, model, year, trim and VIN of every vehicle involved in a fatal accident in the U.S. This data is fed into the NHTSA database and groups like IIHS and others then carefully separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to real-world safety.
In such an analysis just completed by IIHS, not a single Volvo earned a spot among the safest models. Yet, vehicles made by Toyota, Jeep, Mazda, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, VW, BMW, and Audi all have models that do make it to the top of the list. Nissan, Chevy, and Ford also have models with lower reported death rates than do the best Volvo models.
IIHS separates the vehicles by how many driver deaths occurred using a metric called "driver deaths per million registered vehicle years. A lower score is better, and since the study looks at real-world data the model years studied are primarily 2014, but also the few years surrounding that model year if no major changes were made to the vehicles.
