Lincoln Corsair, Aviator Nab 2021 IIHS Top Safety Pick
Photo: Lincoln
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced a huge wave of 2021 IIHS Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ winners in February — including two of the top dogs in the Lincoln Motor Company lineup. The 2021 Lincoln Corsair and Lincoln Aviator both pulled down IIHS TSP honors, making three straight years for the former and two years in a row for the latter.
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In order to score the IIHS Top Safety Pick, vehicles have to earn “Good” scores in the organization’s six crashworthiness tests: driver-side small overlap front, passenger-side small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength, and head restraints.
Vehicles must also offer a crash prevention system that scores a rating of “Advanced” or “Superior” for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian situations. A Top Safety Pick must also offer headlights with an “Acceptable” rating — “Acceptable” or “Good” headlights across the board will earn a vehicle the TSP+.
Aviator nearly scores IIHS TSP+ ranking
Photo: Lincoln
The Lincoln Aviator juuuust missed getting the Top Safety Pick+ — its available Adaptive Pixel LED Headlamps earned “Good” scores, but the standard LED headlights fell just shy of “Acceptable” due to “inadequate [visibility] on the right side.” Apart from this, the 2021 Aviator was nearly perfect across the board in IIHS testing.
The Corsair’s available jeweled LED headlamps rated “Acceptable,” but the standard LED reflector headlamps earned “Poor” scores due to excessive low-beam glare and visibility issues on the left side. However, the Corsair topped the Aviator in the child seat attachment test — which isn’t factored into TSP rankings — with a “Good+” score.
Of note is the fact that Pre-Collision Assist with Automatic Emergency Braking, standard with Lincoln Co-Pilot360, earned a score of “Superior” while the version available with Lincoln Co-Pilot 360 Plus was rated as “Advanced” in both cases.
The new Lincoln Nautilus just missed earning the IIHS Top Safety Pick due to headlight scores. IIHS did not test the 2021 Lincoln Navigator.
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Kyle S. Johnson lives in Cincinnati, a city known by many as “the Cincinnati of Southwest Ohio.” He enjoys professional wrestling, Halloween, and also other things. He has been writing for a while, and he plans to continue to write well into the future. See more articles by Kyle.