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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -
It used to be that if you wanted a car that was really safe, you paid for it. Safety was a luxury you found in expensive European cars like Volvo and BMW.
No longer. With crash test results and other safety data now widely available, no car company wants one of its models tagged as unsafe. And few are.
There are still some vehicles that are safer than others, but it's surprising how many really safe cars there are these days at non-luxury prices. Cost is no longer the issue. Newness is.
In the list of award-winning ultra-safe cars recently released by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, there were two common factors.
First, all the cars had head-protecting side airbags.
Second, all the cars were of recent design.
The Ford Five Hundred, for example, was a brand new model when it was introduced for the 2005 model year. It was designed using the Volvo S80's vehicle architecture. (Volvo is owned by Ford.) Basically, that's the vehicle's floor-pan design and some other underlying metal structures.
The Volvo S80 wasn't among the award-winning cars, though, because it was designed in the late 1990s, long before the Insurance Institute started doing its own side-impact crash tests in 2003. The Insurance Institute's test uses a barrier that mimics the front end of an SUV, meaning that the impact comes higher up on the vehicle, closer to an occupant's head and where the vehicle structure tends to be weaker.
Partly because the Five Hundred was designed with that crash test in mind, it did particularly well. The Volvo S80 has not undergone the Institute's side-impact test because the company did not request it. A redesigned S80 is in the works, said Dan Johnston, a Volvo spokesman, so a test on the current design would have been of little value to consumers.
Provided they are equipped with head-protecting side airbags, few vehicles today do poorly in either the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's crash tests or the Insurance Institute's tests. As you would expect, vehicles that do well in those tests also have comparatively low real-world fatalities, according to surveys of crash data.
Driving down costs
Making cars safer does cost money. The Ford Five Hundred and Mercury Montego got Gold safety awards only for versions equipped with head-protecting side airbags.
Head-protecting side airbags generally cost $600 to $800 as an option, but more vehicles are offering them as standard equipment.
Vehicle stability control systems, which use computers to help keep vehicles from skidding or tipping over under extreme driving maneuvers, are also becoming more common. That was partly because of NHTSA's new dynamic stability test. That test is difficult for some vehicles, particularly some SUVs, to pass without using the systems. Some companies, including Toyota, have made stability control standard on all their SUVs.
Again, besides passing a test, those systems have also been shown to reduce dangerous crashes in real-world driving.
Besides test requirements, the Insurance Institute's chief operating officer, Adrian Lund, also credits the pressure of big lawsuits with making cars at all prices safer. No car company wants to tell a jury that a proven lifesaving technology, like stability control or side airbags, was available but they didn't use it on some unfortunate crash victim's car because that car was too cheap.
In our gallery we offer a few examples of cars with sticker prices of less than $25,000 that are especially safe. Not all were IIHS Gold award winners, because those awards took into account rear-impact. Since rear-impact crashes are rarely life threatening, we've looked at other crash test results from the Insurance Institute and the government.
There is one way in which more expensive cars do tend to be safer, even when crash test scores are the same. Larger cars tend to be more expensive than smaller ones and, all other things being equal, a larger car will be safer in a wreck than a smaller one.
Our list of safe and cheap cars
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