The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has recently completed safety testing for the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX electric crossovers. The results aren’t bad, but they fall short in one important category, preventing them from earning Top Safety Pick awards.
Why do we care about the safety ratings of Honda and Acura crossovers here at GM Authority? They’re both based on GM’s BEV3 platform, and they’re built at the GM Ramos Arizpe plant in Mexico and the GM Spring Hill plant in Tennessee, respectively. These safety ratings are indicators of how the closely related Chevy Blazer EV and Cadillac Lyriq – which haven’t yet been crash-tested by the IIHS – will perform in the same testing.
“Two new electric SUVs, the midsize luxury 2024 Acura ZDX and midsize 2024 Honda Prologue, miss out on awards after coming up short in the small overlap front test,” the IIHS said in a press release. While both crossovers earned either “Good” or “Acceptable” ratings in every category, neither was good enough to take home an IIHS Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick+ award.
“Both the Prologue and ZDX earn acceptable ratings in the small overlap front test because the passenger dummy’s head slipped between the front and side curtain airbags during the test,” the IIHS said. “A good rating in this test has been a Top Safety Pick requirement for many years.” In other words, no matter how good the results are in every other category, an “Acceptable” rating in the small overlap front category prohibits the Prologue and ZDX from earning the coveted Top Safety Pick status.
The only category where the ZDX and Prologue have different ratings is Headlights. The Acura gets a “Good” rating, and the Honda only gets “Acceptable.” “Acura made changes to the headlights supplied with the ZDX, and the current ones earn a good rating,” the IIHS said. “The headlights supplied with vehicles built before September are rated poor.”
We’ll monitor the latest safety scores for the Chevy Blazer EV and Cadillac Lyriq, but it seems unlikely that either will earn the IIHS Top Safety Pick award.
Watch the IIHS’s driver-side small overlap crash test of the Honda Prologue. More crash-test videos of the Prologue and ZDX can be found on the IIHS YouTube channel.
Comments
This wouldn’t have happened with the 3.6.
It would be interesting to see what enhancements in the vehicles would have helped with the safety scores and what the cost(s) of these enhancements would have been. I wonder if GM tests the vehicles in the same way as IIHS during the design and evaluation process? I also wonder about the real-world injury statistics for vehicles with differing levels of IIHS scoring.
Well they didnt burst into an uncontrollable lithium ion fireball !