2015 Ford F-150 Crash Test Results Are A Mixed Bag

2015 Ford F-150 (Credit: Ford)

Ford’s stirred up the hornets’ nest by daring to create a pickup truck that incorporates aluminum and other lightweight materials into its structure. Chevy has blasted its rival for being innovative and “reckless,” while quite a few other organizations have questioned how feasible the new design is in the real world.

Adding fuel to the fire are the new crash test results for the 2015 F-150, which are a mixed bag of outcomes. Already, Ford’s highlighting the good and ignoring the rest, while Chevy and others will no doubt concentrate on the bad.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) gave the F-150 a Top Safety Pick rating, thanks to the truck doing well on a variety of tests. While Ford’s talking this fact up big time, the truth is that only the SuperCrew configuration of the pickup earned the safety distinction. The SuperCrew has steel reinforcements that are positioned in front and behind the front wheels. They keep the wheels from being pushed into the cabin, which in turn cuts down on the risk of injury in a wreck.

Regular-cab and SuperCab F-150s don’t have this added safety feature, and it showed in the IIHS tests. A prime example was with the notoriously difficult small-overlap test. The SuperCrew did well, with the risk of injury low. The SuperCab earned a marginal score in the test, with quite a bit of intrusion happening in the cabin, including the steering wheel and dashboard almost touching the crash dummy’s chest. On top of that, the A-pillars deformed and other structural parts crumbled, which earned a poor rating from IIHS. There’s no performing worse than that, which is something Ford should be concerned about.

The 2015 Ford F-150 is the first vehicle IIHS has ever tested where the results were incredibly different, depending on the truck’s configuration. There’s some speculation that Ford isn’t alone in producing pickups with wildly differing safety standards, which is why IIHS is getting ready to test out the different configurations of competing trucks. Ford says it’s going to fix the flaws in the F-150, but some damage to its reputation is already done.