Thursday, August 26, 2010

IIHS vs NHTSA.


When you go to Cincinnati Chevy with the hopes of picking out a new vehicle, there are several things you will take into consideration.  You will want to make sure you are getting a great price on a quality vehicle that you enjoy driving.  Not only will the vehicles from Honda Longview need to meet your expectations, but you will want to make sure that they meet the needs of you and your family.  One key item that several auto brands use to help sell their inventory is crash test rating scores.  So what is the big difference between someone saying a car is "good" or giving that same car four stars?

In America, there are two institutions that evaluate crash tests for vehicle safety.  They are the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.  Now both agencies might have tested the vehicles at Chrysler Dodge Jeep St. George, but perhaps the dealership is only using one set of scores as the selling point.  For those people familiar with college entrance exams, there is the SAT and the ACT.  Both do a fairly good job of predicting how well you will do in college and schools use it as a way to measure people from a wide variety of backgrounds.  But, a student might do better on one test than on another, and thus it would be assumed that they would report the higher score.  The same kind of thing goes on with crash test scores. 

Here is a simple enough example.  The NHTSA does their rankings in a star system, with five being the highest and one being the lowest.  Five stars means there is less than 10% chance of injury while one star means greater than 46% chance of injury.  IIHS ranks their scores as being good, acceptable, marginal, or poor.  While you can infer how safe the passengers of your car are by these terms, the IIHS also looks at how well the vehicle does under the crash test. 



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