The Ford F-150 aced a suite of crash tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and earned the nonprofit group’s “Top Safety Pick” rating. Except that’s not entirely true.
Only the bestselling body style, the four-door SuperCrew, passed all five tests with the highest-possible “good” rating. The reason? Ford installs steel members fore and aft of the front wheel wells (in yellow, below) to prevent those wheels from intruding into the cabin space, but the company doesn’t fit them to SuperCab or regular-cab bodies.
Ford installed steel reinforcements above, in yellow) only in its 2015 F-150 SuperCrew trucks, and not the other body styles.
During the IIHS small frontal overlap test, which simulates hitting a pole or a car head-on by contacting 25 percent of a vehicle’s frontal area at 40 mph, the SuperCrew’s body cage remained “largely intact” with a “low risk of injuries,” the group said. The smaller F-150 SuperCab pickup (pictured at top) scored “marginal” due to “significant intrusion” of the passenger cabin, as the dashboard and steering wheel came “dangerously close” to the dummy’s chest. Since the A-pillars buckled and other body components “seriously compromised the driver’s survival space,” the IIHS rated this F-150’s structure as “poor,” which is below “marginal” and the group’s worst rating. Vehicles have to earn “good” or “acceptable” ratings in all tests to qualify as a Top Safety Pick.
“That shortchanges buyers who might pick the extended cab thinking it offers the same protection in this type of crash as the crew cab,” said David Zuby, the Institute’s chief research officer. “It doesn’t.”
An Automotive News report on the differing structures published in June prompted the IIHS to test two F-150 body styles instead of the single most popular variant, as it does for every other car it tests. While it’s not unusual to see cars with varying crash structures in the U.S. versus overseas—the U.S. has its own roof-crush standards, as well as other more stringent rules including those for side-curtain airbags—it’s the first time the IIHS has witnessed such divergent results for one U.S.-specified car model. As a result, the IIHS says it’s planning to crash-test several body styles of other full-size pickups this year, and it is investigating whether other manufacturers also are reinforcing vehicle trims it knows the IIHS will test.
Compare the performance of this 2015 Ford F-150 SuperCrew with that of the 2015 Ford F-150 SuperCab pictured at top.
Ford responded to Automotive News by saying that it will add “countermeasures” to 2016 regular-cab and extended SuperCab F-150s, but stopped short of confirming it would install the same steel bars across the full lineup, telling the publication that “the type of countermeasure and structure will vary by cab type.”
In AN‘s June story, Ford said, “We optimize each cab structure based on many factors including cab style, mass, wheelbase, powertrain, and driveline to meet regulatory requirements and achieve public-domain ratings.” Those “public-domain ratings” were clarified by Ford in this week’s AN report to be “crash testing.”
2015 Ford F-150 SuperCab (left) and 2015 Ford F-150 SuperCrew (right).
The small overlap crash test, first introduced in 2012, forced automakers to quickly adopt changes after the IIHS revealed that most new cars—including luxury sedans—weren’t strong enough to prevent significant injuries in this common accident type. Toyota, for example, launched a 2014.5 model-year Camry that specifically addressed the body structure in relation to the test, and other manufacturers made similar improvements as quickly as the following model year.
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