2025 Honda Pilot Advances to IIHS Top Safety Pick+
For 2024, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is requiring satisfactory scores in an updated crash test that is proving to be a struggle for some vehicles. Honda’s reaction to the Pilot’s unsatisfactory performance for the 2024 model year was swift, and as a result, the 2025 Pilot earns the IIHS’s highest honor, the Top Safety Pick+ award.
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The IIHS rates vehicle performance on a four-point scale: poor, marginal, acceptable and good. To receive a Top Safety Pick+ award, a vehicle must earn good ratings in two separate frontal crash tests and a side impact test. It must also have headlights that rate acceptable or good and a forward collision warning system that rates acceptable or good in a pedestrian detection test.
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Barriers and Hurdles
The test that is proving difficult is the updated moderate overlap front test. In it, the subject vehicle is accelerated to 40 mph and strikes a barrier that covers 40% of the vehicle’s width. The barrier’s face is made from a deformable aluminum honeycomb and results in forces roughly equivalent to those in an offset head-on collision where both vehicles are traveling at just under 40 mph.
Historically, the test has been performed with a single test dummy representing an average man in the driver’s seat. A good rating in the single-occupant test will still qualify a vehicle for Top Safety Pick honors, but the Top Safety Pick+ award is reserved for those that excel with an additional passenger on board. In the updated version of the test, a second dummy the size of a small woman or an average 12-year-old child sits in the seat behind the driver.
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Quick Fix
IIHS’s reasoning for updating the test is that most vehicles now adequately protect front-seat occupants, as the basic cabin structure of modern vehicles typically holds up well in the sort of crashes the agency recreates. Rear-seat safety is largely a question of passenger restraint.
Honda’s fix for the 2025 Pilot demonstrates the relative ease of improving rear-seat safety: The company revised the seat belt retractors. That one little change better controlled the motion of the dummy during the crash, reducing the likelihood of injury. It also improved the 2025 Pilot’s performance in the updated moderate overlap front test to an acceptable rating (the 2024 model received a marginal score).
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