One Car Question Gets Asked 125 Ways per Search. Another Gets 2,878 Different Wordings.
Some car questions have a settled way of being asked. Others get reinvented by every person who has them. Sorting a year of real searches by topic separates the questions people have a word for from the ones they do not.
Two Thirds of 2022 Cars Failed the Seat Belt Reminder Test. By 2026 It Was 18%.
A rating that measures a chime sounds trivial until you look at what it is for. Nearly half of people killed in crashes are unbelted, and the cheapest available intervention is a car that refuses to shut up.
The Side Impact Barrier Got Heavier and Faster. Two Thirds of Top Scores Disappeared.
The old side impact test used a barrier modelled on a mid-2000s SUV. Rebuilding it around what people actually drive now removed the top score from most of the cars that had it.
54,604 Complaints Describe Something That Almost Happened. The Power Train Leads.
Safety data counts what happened. A large set of complaints exists specifically to report what did not, and those reports arrive from systems that rarely appear in crash statistics at all.
The Passenger Side Was Tested Fifteen Years After the Driver's. It Scores Better.
For over a decade, one side of the car was crash tested and the other was assumed to match. When the assumption was finally checked, the results said something unexpected about how safety engineering responds to being measured.
88% of Cars Failed the Whiplash Test in 2000. Since 2020, Not One Has.
Most safety measures improve slowly and never finish. This one finished. Tracing head restraint ratings across two decades shows what it looks like when an industry solves something completely.
Automatic Braking Is on Almost Every New Car. One in Five Systems Rates Poor or Marginal.
Two cars can both advertise automatic emergency braking and perform completely differently when tested against a pedestrian at night. The badge on the window sticker says nothing about which one you have.
11,447 People Were Injured by a Car That Never Crashed. 1,492 of Those Reports Name the Airbag.
Injury data is usually read as crash data. A quarter of the injuries in the complaint record happened with no impact of any kind, and the components responsible are not the ones you would expect.
Every RAM Rated for Child Seat Anchors Came Back Poor or Marginal. All 23.
The hardware that holds a child seat is rated separately from everything else, on a simple question: can somebody fit a seat correctly without a fight. A quarter of the market fails it.
IIHS Put a Dummy in the Back Seat. 147 Cars That Scored Good Now Don't.
For years the front crash test measured the driver. When a rear dummy was added, the same cars stopped passing — and the gap says something uncomfortable about where safety engineering went.
68,482 Owners Wrote That It Happened Without Warning. Most of Them Meant the Engine.
Most faults announce themselves. A noise, a light, a smell, something that gets worse over a week. A measurable share do not, and the complaint text says which systems behave that way.
A Third of Cars Have Headlights Rated Poor or Marginal. At Cadillac, Four in Five.
Crash stars measure what happens during an impact. Headlight ratings measure whether you saw the thing you hit. The two scores disagree more often than most buyers realise, and one of them almost never appears in a listing.