The 2013 Toyota Camry may have been the recipient of a five-star crash test rating from the government, but the Camry didn’t fare quite so well in a new, more difficult crash test conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The group put a number of vehicles to the test, including the Camry and Toyota’s other flagship sedan, the Prius V. Unfortunately for Toyota, the results weren’t good – the IIHS rated both sedans as “poor.”
The “small overlap” test, as the IIHS is calling it, involves crashing the front corner of a vehicle into a barrier at 40 mph. The purpose of this is to determine how well a vehicle would hold up in a collision with a telephone pole, or a tree.
More specifically, the test is designed to see whether or not the vehicle’s tire could be pushed into the footwell, which could cause the driver serious injury. Both the Camry and the Prius V failed.
“Toyota’s engineers have a lot of work to do to match the performance of their competitors,” IIHS President Adrian Lund said in a statement.
It’s certainly not the news that Toyota would have wanted, but the company does at least seem to be taking it well.
“The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) periodically develops new, more severe or specialized tests which go beyond federal requirements,” Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons said in a statement . “With this new test, the Institute has raised the bar again and we will respond to the challenge.
