Honda’s Impressive Safety Turnaround of the Early 1980s
It’s hard to believe nowadays – especially for someone like me, whose mom owes her life to Honda safety engineering – that Honda was once among the least safe car brands you could buy. And while most Japanese cars were closer to the bottom of the safety rankings in 1979, when the NHTSA 35-mph crash test first came out, but rapidly improved over the course of the 1980s, it was almost as if a switch flipped at Honda as their cars went from death traps to top performers in the span of a few short years.
Let’s compare the average severe injury risks of all 1979-1980 cars tested vs. all 1982-1984 cars tested:
1979-1980: 46% driver, 50% passenger
1982-1984: 32% driver, 28% passenger
Let’s compare the average severe injury risks of 1979-1980 Hondas vs. 1982-1984 Hondas:
1979-1980: 99% driver, 77% passenger
1982-1984: 11% driver, 11% passenger
For comparison, the two Volvos tested from 1982-1984 had an average risk of 14% for the driver and 13% for the passenger. And while, in a real-world situation, the Volvos would be safer than the Hondas, it does underscore the scale of the improvement.
We’ve already touched on how Honda made a massive improvement to the Civic during the production run of its second generation. This paper (page 812-813) briefly details some of these improvements. The 1981 Accord and Prelude also had modifications to their seat belts, seat structures, and steering columns, but NHTSA failed to test a 1981 Accord or 1981-1983 Prelude. However, the redesigned 1982 Accord and 1984 Prelude both did very well in NHTSA testing; the 1984 Civic redesign carried forward the improvements brought by the 1981-1983 models. All three of these vehicles did very well for their era in the 35-mph NHTSA test; even going by the “5 star” system standard (not introduced until 1994, but applicable to any 1979-2010 frontal test), the 1979-1980 Hondas were a solid sheet of one-star ratings, never even coming close to a second star for either occupant. The 1982-1984 models were a mix of 4 and 5 star ratings.
These improvements did come with a caveat, though: structurally, these safer Hondas performed somewhat worse than their predecessors. This ’80 Civic and ’80 Prelude held up very well structurally, with the occupant space appearing to be totally intact from the outside. However, this ’81 Civic and ’82 Accord had jammed front doors and some deformation of the A-pillars.
However, crucially, the steering columns, which were the major inflictor of driver injury on the older models, stayed in place on the 1982-1984 models instead of rotating upward, so the heads hit the rim instead of the stiffer hub. And there was a method to their madness with the somewhat weakened structures; the more a car crumples, the less G-forces are put on the occupant compartment. The older structures may have been strong enough to take a full-front crash at well over 35 mph, but it would have been a moot point as the occupants would have probably been killed well before serious damage occurred to the occupant compartment. The newer models were barely strong enough to take a 35-mph full front crash, but that was the yardstick at the time, and these newer Hondas provided much better 35-mph protection than the average car of the era.
And today’s cars are much stronger structurally than any of these vehicles. Today, with airbags and pretensioned seat belts, much lower injury measures than even those seen on the 1982-1984 Hondas are possible in a structure that can take far more than a 35-mph full front crash.
