Massive intrusion into the passenger compartment. I'm amazed that the car didn't deflect off of the barrier like most of the other cars tested; instead all of the crash energy is pretty much directed at the driver.
As a volunteer EMT; in this case the seat belt is just one more thing I would have to cut away to pull your (dead) body out.
Not sure. When they showed the interior shot I could make out a 4 on the speedo. So it's over 40 mph.
Yeah they are. The amount of intrusion is shocking. I'm wondering how similar the frontal structures of the lift back and the V are. If they are similar, I would guess the lift back would perform poorly as well.
It looks like upon impact the knee airbags, along with the steering wheel, drivers airbag and the entire dash structure is pushed offset into the passenger side.
Watching this video again, it appears the front wheel actually gets pushed through the firewall INTO the drivers footwell. This is very alarming...
Can one speculate on how the lift back will do in this small overlap test? Don't they share a lot of common design up front? The wheel instruction part is very disturbing.
I came across this picture on Instagram and I was shocked to see that the bumper beam doesn't fully extend across the front of the car. I would assume that the liftback would also perform poorly in a small overlap because there would be nothing to absorb the impact. This, and the fact that the every Toyota or Lexus Vehicle tested received a poor rating leads me to believe that they did not design their vehicles with good performance in a small overlap crash in mind. I'm sure that beefing up the front end of a car would make it heavier and probably reduce fuel efficiency and I think that their cars were designed to do well in the NHTSA and IIHS Medium offset tests, but not the various types of real world accidents. Being a liftback owner, this does worry me a little. Supposedly Toyota is going to do some tweaks to its vehicles in the future to perform better.
