- The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Top Safety Pick+ award is among the most important measures of car safety in the U.S.
- Soon, only cars that monitor their driver’s behavior will earn it
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) Top Safety Pick+ award may be the best tool car shoppers have for evaluating the safety of a car. It’s about to get much harder to earn.
The IIHS announced this week that “vehicle technology that can detect certain types of risky driver behavior will soon be added to the requirements.”
Speaking at an event in Washington, D.C., to honor the 45th anniversary of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, IIHS President David Harkey said the institute would “leverage our ratings and award programs to encourage automakers to adopt this new class of safety technology, just as we got them to improve vehicle structures, airbags, and collision avoidance systems.”
In a statement, the IIHS said it would add driver monitoring technology to its awards criteria “by 2030 or sooner.”
The IIHS Is a Tough Grader
- The institute is funded by insurance companies, which have a financial interest in avoiding crashes
- Its crash tests and awards criteria routinely get harder in a way that government tests rarely do
Many countries have one agency that crash tests cars and issues safety ratings. America has two.
One is the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The IIHS is the other, and has a much tougher reputation.
If NHTSA wants to introduce a new test or make one harder, it must go through a laborious public process that includes time for the automotive industry to object.
If the IIHS wants to tighten standards, it can do so immediately. The people who pay for it — your insurance company — want it to do so often.
When it does, cars tend to get safer.
In recent years, the institute has required automakers to use better headlights to win awards, added a child-size rear-seat test dummy to some crash tests, and started testing cars’ ability to avoid hitting a pedestrian in the dark.
In every case, fewer cars have won an award immediately after a rule change. Then, the number of awards started to climb as automakers re-engineered cars to pass the harder tests.
Driver Monitor Tech Exists; The IIHS Wants to Make It Common
- Many cars already have technology to monitor for impaired, drowsy, or distracted drivers
- When a technology is new and not tested, it’s often very different from brand to brand
Many cars today have systems that monitor whether the driver is paying attention. These could also catch drowsy or impaired drivers.
Some use cameras to track the driver’s eyes. Others measure the tiny steering corrections an alert driver makes, often unconsciously.
Since no agency tests them, experts lack good data on what approach works best.
The IIHS also notes that one of its recent studies “found that if all vehicles were equipped with technology to prevent anyone with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08% or higher from driving, more than 10,000 lives a year would be saved.”
Government safety watchdogs could also contribute.
A 2021 law will require automakers to install anti-drunk-driving technology in all cars by 2026. However, NHTSA has not yet published rules explaining how it will carry out that law. The regulatory climate of the current presidential administration tends to favor industry perspectives, which could leave that law toothless.
However, automakers will compete to win Top Safety Pick+ awards, so the institute’s move could have a greater impact on car safety.
