Many of the seat/head restraints we evaluated didn't even get to the testing stage ... These cannot begin to protect most people in rear-end crashes.

Subaru was one of the manufacturers that last year asked us to delay side testing because of vehicle design changes that were in progress. It's not uncommon for us to grant such requests as long as the design changes will be made in production models within a reasonable time. The goal of our crash test program is to encourage these kinds of improvements to reduce injury risk in real-world crashes.

Bumpers that bump apparently weren't a consideration during the design phase ... Designing good bumpers is no great engineering challenge ... but unless this is a priority we're going to continue seeing many manufacturers using inferior designs.

The four-point harness would be protective, but not as big a benefit as it would have been before airbags.

We're not getting much new information from the tests, and have been looking for a way to do more side crashes, so we have side-crash data for all the vehicles we have frontal results for.

Usually when an automaker doesn't ask for the optional test, we presume it means the side airbags wouldn't help much to improve the car's rating. But now Ford has requested a second test, so the Fusion with side airbags may earn a better rating than poor. We'll conduct the test and report the result.