The Ford F-150 was the only pickup truck to earn the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's top rating in the organization's latest crash tests.
The Ford F-150 SuperCab scored Good in the small-overlap crash test. It joins the F-150 SuperCrew, which was tested last year, as an IIHS Top Safety Pick when equipped with optional forward-collision warning system.
The SuperCab garnered a Marginal rating last year in the small-overlap front crash, while the SuperCrew did well. For this year's model, Ford added countermeasures to the F-150 SuperCab to make it structurally more similar to the SuperCrew—such as wheel blockers, nylon hinge pillar reinforcements, and rocker panel reinforcements.
Ford has indicated that the same countermeasures added to the SuperCab structure will also be added to the regular cab F-150 in this model year.
The crash tests were conducted on extended cab and crew cab full-sized trucks, the most popular body styles. (Extended cab trucks have a pair of small rear doors and a compact backseat, whereas crew cab trucks have four full doors and two rows of full-sized seating.)
See our pickup truck buying advice and ratings.
The small-overlap test assesses how a vehicle performs in a crash when an impact strikes the front corner of a vehicle. It represents the equivalent of a vehicle running off the road and hitting an immovable tree or telephone pole at 40 mph or clips a vehicle heading in the other direction.
A Marginal or Poor rating is often the result of components such as front wheels, engine parts, or the steering wheel intruding into the occupant seating area. To look for other variations among trucks, IIHS decided to test two body styles of each model-year pickup for 2016, rather than just one. This double-check promises that safety standards are consistent across a model line.
The 2016 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Double Cab and the Toyota Tundra Double Cab received an Acceptable rating in the small-overlap front crash test, while the Silverado 1500 Crew Cab and Tundra CrewMax only earned Marginal ratings in the small-overlap test. Both the Ram 1500 Crew Cab and Ram 1500 Quad Cab earned a Poor rating for structure and an overall small-overlap rating of Marginal.
Consumer Reports’ Overall Scores change when new information and test findings are available. These IIHS results will hurt the scores of the 2016 Chevrolet Silverado 1500, GMC Sierra 1500, Ram 1500, and Toyota Tundra.
The Ford F-150 SuperCrew and SuperCab Overall Scores remain unchanged because we assume good crash test performance and only penalize for low scores, rather than reward for good ones.