Safety Info Is Scarce for High-Performance Cars
People who buy bright red two-doors with 450 horsepower generally do not have safety front of mind, which is good because there’s not a lot of safety information to find out anyway.
Neither the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) nor the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the two most prominent safety-rating agencies, run crash tests on sports cars.
Russ Rader, the Senior Vice President of Communications at IIHS, said it’s because sports cars are “typically niche-vehicles.’’ Plus IIHS has to buy its own cars, so crashing $80,000 Porsches isn’t the best financial choice.
Still, if you’re dropping 80-grand on a car, you might want to learn a little more about the likelihood you’ll die in it. Despite the scarcity of information, there are a few safety-related things you should understand.
First of all, it’s nearly impossible to compare the safety performance of one sports car to that of another. The lack of standardized crash tests is a major reason why, but even real-world information is flawed when it comes to individual models of sports cars.
Every couple of years, IIHS releases data on driver deaths per million vehicles. For popular cars, the report gives a good idea of how safe it is to drive each model on an actual road, but Rader says there are so few sports cars on the streets that the data set is too small to be totally reliable.
“Often they’re weekend vehicles,’’ said Rader. “Most of the time they’re sitting in the garage. There are not that many crashes because of that.’’ (For what it’s worth, the two-door Nissan 350Z had the worst driver death rate from 2006-2009 and the third-worst from 2002-2005).
But Rader said it’s safe to trust the wider trend of the IIHS data, which should concern anyone in the market for a little speedster. “In general terms, sportier models have a higher death rate,’’ he said.
“That’s mainly a reflection of how they’re driven,’’ Rader added. “Vehicles that have a lot of horse-power and are driven fast are more likely to get into serious crashes.’’
In that sense, the sporadic real-world data may be more telling than standardized crash test ratings could ever be. Rader says it’s totally possible there are sports cars that would test well because new cars have so many sophisticated safety features.
But no car is going to keep you safe if you lose control taking a curve on Route 24 at 100 mph.
“When you’re in a high speed crash you’re overwhelming the safety features that are built into modern cars,’’ said Rader.
So when it comes down to it, if you’re worried about being safe in your new toy, just drive safely.
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