The performances of the four large pickup trucks ranged from poor to awful.

It's disappointing that so many minivan seats are rated poor for rear impact protection. Drivers of minivans spend a lot of time on urban and suburban roads where rear-end collisions are common in stop-and-go traffic. Moms often are behind the wheel, and women are more vulnerable to whiplash injuries so they especially need good seats and head restraints.

It's disappointing that so many minivan seats are rated poor for rear impact protection. Drivers of minivans spend a lot of time on urban and suburban roads where rear-end collisions are common in stop-and-go traffic.

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.

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.