Honda Snatches Nine 2022 Top Safety Pick Awards
Honda is maintaining its excellent track record for automotive safety with nine new Top Safety Pick awards, including eight Top Safety Pick+ awards, the most coveted safety rating in the industry, among which were three Acura models.
The award winners were the Honda Accord, Civic Hatchback, Civic Sedan, Insight, Odyssey, CR-V, Acura MDX, RDX, and TLX. The CR-V was the only one of these not to get that special TPS+ designation reserved for vehicles that have acceptable or good headlights as standard equipment rather than offered merely as options.
Related: Find a new, highly-rated Honda car
For the past few years, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has no longer granted its Top Safety Pick award to vehicles that merely pass its crashworthiness evaluations with flying colors. Nowadays, vehicles must be do more than simply perform well in a crash. On top of the headlights requirement, to earn an award vehicles must also have advanced or superior front crash prevention systems capable of detecting both vehicles and pedestrians.
Thanks to Honda Sensing (and AcuraWatch in the automaker’s luxury models), which is standard or available as an option in every car that the manufacturer sells in America, passing the front crash prevention test is no trouble. All nine of the awarded Honda and Acura models earned the highest possible score in that evaluation, in both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian categories.
Where does it go from here for Honda? It’s notable that it doesn’t just have a lot of TPS awards — every single Honda or Acura the IIHS has tested so far has earned that distinction, meaning that the only possible improvement would be to turn the CR-V’s optional LED headlights into standard equipment, which doesn’t seem like a big job and may well already be planned for the 2023 model year.
There is only a small handful of other automakers with a lineup as extensive as Honda that can claim to have such a high success rate in IIHS testing. So — hats off, Honda.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.