KIA | Put To The Test
Surviving a car accident is largely about kinetic energy.
When your body is moving at 35 mph, it has kinetic energy. After a crash, it has none. To minimize the risk of injury, you need to remove the kinetic energy as slowly and evenly as possible, and some of the safety features of your car will do the work for you.
KIA makes pretty safe cars. They all have dual front airbags, front seat-mounted side airbags, and other advanced safety systems. But hopefully you’ll never have an experience with any of them.
Now, what if we told you that every KIA also has a front seatbelt pretensioner? We’re guessing you might ask what that is.
Well, the pretensioner is another important features that helps keep us anchored if we are ever in a head-on car collision. It’s part of why seat belts are so important. In case of a car crash, you can half your chances of dying just by wearing one.
A seatbelt pretensioner is a useful bit of technology that forces the seatbelt to retract forcefully when the air bags deploy. This puts you in a safer seating position.
When you add the pretension into a system that also includes force limiters, which kicks in to make sure that the tightening of the seat belt doesn’t hurt you, and airbags that absorb some of your forward motion, you can see your car’s safety systems at work.
What about Safety Tests?
To ensure safety and quality, all KIA autos are tested first in Korea, to the specifications required for the American and other markets. Second, the models are tested at KIA’s California or Michigan Proving Grounds.
At the 4,300-acre Irvine tracks, a racetrack was constructed to recreate North American road and highway scenarios. Safety systems, such as the Electronic Stability Control and standard side-impact airbags are tested and refined here.
Crash, crash, and crash again
If a car is chosen by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) to be tested, and not all are, then it is shipped off for further scrutiny.
“IIHS chooses vehicles for testing based in part on sales figures,” says Russ Rader, senior vice president of communications for IIHS. “We don’t test sports cars or high-end luxury cars. We buy the cars off dealer lots like consumers do, so they have to be on the market.”
IIHS’s 22,000-square-foot crash facility has three runways, used to replicate sudden crashes into another vehicle or into fixed obstacles. The cavernous crash hall can handle any size vehicle, up to a tractor-trailer. The facility wrecks between 50 and 70 cars each year.
The specially designed crash tests demonstrate how a specific model protects passengers during front and side impacts. By driving a fast-moving vehicle into a deformable barrier made of aluminum honeycomb attached to a steel and concrete wall, these tests show what it would be like to crush a real car in an accident.
KIA achieves award-winning safety ratings
Not all KIAs are created equal. The safest models, according to the IIHS, are the Soul, the Rio, and the Cadenza. The Sportage, Sorento, Sedona, and Optima all come in next, while other models have room for improvement.
Another car crash testing facility is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in Washington, D.C. As a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Transportation, NHTSA researches and regulates safety features and updates to help car buyers make more informed decisions when it comes to choosing a vehicle.
Each year, NHTSA tests a sample of new vehicles predicted to have high sales volume, or vehicles that have been entirely redesigned. Even though not every car is rated, all vehicles sold in the U.S. must meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.
