How safe is your pickup truck?

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The battle to produce the biggest, toughest, meanest pickup is never-ending. Carmakers spend breathtaking amounts of time, energy and money boosting horsepower, features, towing capacity and the like. Apparently, amid all the brawn and dust and sweat and steel-alloyed testosterone, a little something called safety sometimes gets left behind.

According to newly released safety ratings by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, of the six vehicles it places in the full-size pickup category, only three receive the highest marks for side-impact protection, and only four make the cut for rear-impact protection.

The safety laggards are the Nissan Titan and the Chevy Silverado, the second-best selling pickup in the country. For side impact safety, both are rated as ‘poor’ in the IIHS’s four-grade rating system (good, acceptable, marginal and poor), and both rank only ‘acceptable’ in rear-end crashes. The Dodge Ram was only a bit better, scoring an uninspiring ‘marginal’ for side impact.

The shining stars, meanwhile, are the Toyota Tundra, Honda Ridgeline and the Ford F-150, which netted perfect ‘good’ ratings for front, side and rear impact.

Tough break for the Titan, Silverado and Ram. But hey, at least they’re safer than cars, right?

Wrong, said David Zuby, senior vice president of the IIHS. ‘The size, weight and height of these large pickups should help them ace the side tests, just like the other large pickups we’ve tested,’ he said. ‘Not these three; they perform worse than many cars we’ve evaluated.” In fact, according to the IIHS, not a single midsized sedan scored lower than ‘acceptable.’

Ouch....

According to the IIHS, the side-impact test is a good test for comparing vehicle safety since the institute uses the same size, weight and speed of an object to smack into the car being tested every time (it uses a truck or SUV-shaped barrier moving at 31 miles per hour). A frontal test is not so hot for that, because the mass of the test vehicle will differ.

So all things being equal in a side-impact test, trucks should always be safer, the IIHS said, since the passengers are higher off the ground, not to mention that trucks weigh more and tend to use more thick steel and nifty steel runners and the like. Get side-smacked in a truck, the thinking goes, and break a leg, but not much else. Cars, on the other hand, tend to put human livers, hearts and lungs right at bumper level.

What gives?

The Ford, Toyota and Honda offerings kept the crash on the outside of the cabin, where it belongs. Meanwhile, said the IIHS, the Silverado’s lack of side torso airbags is a major problem, as are its insufficiently strong side structures. Nada bien. Crash-test dummies got broken ribs and internal organ damage. Adding the optional side curtain airbags did nothing to improve the picture.

The Ram and the Titan have beefier sides and doors, apparently, but the Ram also lacks side-torso airbags, and on the Titan they’re only available as an option. With the airbags, the Titan jumps up to a ‘marginal’ rating -- hardly confidence-inspiring. The Ram, well, it has a Hemi.

To be fair, the other major crash testing body, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, throws its top rating, five stars, to the Silverado for side impact, while it awards four stars to the Titan and the Toyota Tundra (the Ram is not yet rated).

But the NHTSA side-impact test, unlike IIHS’, uses a low-height barrier to smack into the test vehicle, rather than a high one, and high impact is considered a much better test of structural integrity. It’s like a body blow versus a uppercut to the jaw. As a result, NHTSA tends to rank most vehicles with four of five stars in side impact, whereas many vehicles score poorly in IIHS testing.

“It’s certainly possible to design a large pickup that offers good occupant protection in side crashes,” Zuby said. Unfortunately, according to his group’s testing, Nissan, GM and Chrysler didn’t quite do that this time around.

-- Ken Bensinger