Don’t be so quick to condemn those minicar ‘deathtraps’

Thud: That sound you heard Wednesday is the sound of most minicars failing a crash test -- and probably also their future sales prospects. Can you say “Corvair” and “Unsafe at Any Speed”?

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed 11 minicars -- the Chevrolet Spark, Fiat 500, Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit, Hyundai Accent, Kia Rio, Mazda 2, Mitsubishi Mirage, Nissan Versa, Toyota Prius C and Toyota Yaris -- into a 5-foot-tall barrier at 40 mph, with 25% of the vehicle’s left-front end hitting the obstacle.

What happened wasn’t pretty (see the video with this post, if you have the stomach). Only the Chevrolet earned an “acceptable” rating. The Fiat, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Mitsubishi and the Toyota Prius C were rated “poor”; the Ford, Kia, Mazda and Toyota Yaris only “marginal.”

Among the more severe problems, as reported by my colleague Jerry Hirsch: “In seven of the cars, either the safety belt didn’t do a good-enough job holding the dummy in place, or the dummy’s head missed or slid off the front air bag. The side curtain air bag didn’t protect the dummy in eight of the cars and didn’t deploy at all in the Toyota Yaris.

“The two worst performers were the Honda Fit and the Fiat 500. The dummy’s head in the Fit crash slid by an air bag and hit the instrument panel. The driver door opened after the hinges tore in the Fiat 500 test.”

Which, OK, sounds bad. After all, what good is an air bag if it functions mostly as a shroud covering your corpse?

So, should we be asking “Where’s Ralph Nader now that we need him”? Have we returned to the bad old days when automakers sold style over safety?

Hardly.

Cars in general -- yes, even these minicars -- are safer than they’ve ever been. Had these cars been crashed head-on into that barrier, I suspect they would have performed much better.

We owe a debt to the Insurance Institute for its crash tests and ratings system, which have pushed automakers to make better, safer cars. But just as cars evolve, so have the institute’s tests. Where once it was about protecting passengers in front-end or side-impact collisions, now it’s about more realistic crashes, such as the side-frontal one.

And Americans -- who in the 1960s fervently resisted even such basic safety features as seat belts -- now take safety seriously, though perhaps not logically. For example, the same people who wouldn’t be caught, well, dead in one of these minicar “deathtraps” probably prefer something like a Chevy Suburban. And to them I say: Ever seen one of those bad boys after a tire blows at freeway speed and it rolls a few times?

Still, you’ll get no argument from me that several midsize sedans, which in most cases cost only a few thousand dollars more than these minicars, offer better crash protection.

But I’m willing to bet that all of these minicar models will be replaced soon by ones that fare better in real-world crashes. And that’s a good thing.

The days of the Corvair are over.

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