The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety does most of its crash testing at 40 mph. The agency gets questions about why it doesn’t test at much higher speeds considering most U.S. drivers regularly drive 70 mph or faster on the freeway.
“Our test speed captures the middle of the distribution of real-world crashes, where we know there are serious and severe injuries. We know there are crashes that are more severe but we are capturing the bulk of the total number of crashes. Most crashes are very low severity,” said Raul Arbelaez, Vice President of IIHS’ Vehicle Research Center.
