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

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.

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.

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.

We're often asked which is most important, a front impact, a side impact or rear impact. And the fact is, you never know what kind of crash you're gonna be in. So what you want, and what we tell people, is to choose a vehicle that does well in all three.