What βTop Safety Pickβ Actually Means
If you have shopped for a car recently, every model seemed to have the badge. The feeling is real. The number is not what you would guess, and the part that has genuinely stopped working is not the part people complain about.
Source: IIHS award status for the 200 vehicles IIHS currently lists, rebuilt 2026-10-22
Most cars do not have one
Of the 200 vehicles IIHS currently lists, 68 hold an award β about one in three. The other 132 hold nothing.
The reason it feels universal is that winning is the only outcome anyone advertises. A manufacturer whose vehicle earned the award puts it in the brochure, the commercial and the window sticker. The two thirds that earned nothing simply do not mention IIHS, so you never see them. You are not looking at a list of cars; you are looking at a list of claims.
The tier is where it breaks down
There are two awards. Top Safety Pick is the lower one. Top Safety Pick+ is the higher one. Among current winners, 76% took the higher tier β 52 of 68.
That is the real problem. Once you have cleared the bar at all, the plus is close to automatic, so it does almost nothing to separate a merely good car from an exceptional one. The badge tells you a vehicle is in the top third. It does not tell you where in the top third.
If you want to see exactly which vehicles hold which award, we keep the full list: every 68 winner, both tiers, with the test results behind each one.
An award without a year means nothing
IIHS raises the bar most years, so the same badge certifies something different each time. The current criteria require a result in the updated moderate overlap front test, which added a second dummy β the size of a small woman or a 12-year-old β belted in the second row behind the driver. Acceptable in that test is the minimum for the lower award; Good is required for the higher one. IIHS added it after finding that in newer vehicles, belted second-row occupants face a higher risk of fatal injury than people in front, because front seats gained better airbags and belt technology that the back seat rarely gets.
A vehicle that earned the top award in 2022 was never measured on any of that. So βTop Safety Pickβ on a used listing, with no year attached, is not a safety claim you can act on. Ask which year, then check what that year required.
What to use instead
The award is a floor, not a ranking, and it was designed that way β IIHS describes it as identifying good choices within a size class, not ordering them. If you want an ordering, you need the underlying test results rather than the badge built on top of them.
That is what this site does: it scores every vehicle on its actual IIHS results and ranks them, so you can see the distance between two cars that both wear the same badge.