Safest Cars in the World

Security has to be one of the top priorities for anyone considering buying a car. But the news about cars lately associated with driving fast than with driving safely. Only five cars on the market boasts of perfect crash-test scores, but 14 cars on the market have top speeds of 202 km / h or higher. Constructing safe cars instead of flashy them could be a too poor choice to make business sense.

As if the high facilitate the mutual exclusivity of fun and safety, no sports cars enter a list of the safest cars on the market. All five cars up in the list are sedans, made by Ford Motor's (NYSE: F - news - people) Crown Victoria, a vehicle often constructed as a taxi and close in spirit to a hearse, and two other dead weights derived from it, Mercury's Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car.

The safest cars do not even appeal to a common buyer, and automakers seem to have no immediate plans to release more of them on the market. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) crash-test scores for 2006-model cars (the model year is underway) have shown five cars with perfect marks. Among the 2005-model cars were the same five cars from 2006, the only one in 2005 to give a perfect score.

Completely expected that there is a Volvo, the S80 sedan, which is part of the five safest cars. But one may wonder why Volvo is the only carmaker that customers naturally link with certainty, despite the efforts of Honda Motor (NYSE: HMC - news - people) and DaimlerChrysler's (NYSE: dcx - news - people) Mercedes- Benz subsidiary to popularize heavily their cars' security features.

Two years ago, Volvo invited journalists to a tour of its Car Safety Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden. The program had a crash-test demonstration - a simulation of what happens when a driver runs a red light and strikes the car with the right of way. A Volvo XC90 SUV, going 30 mph, crashed into the driver's door of a Volvo S40 sedan as it rolled forward at 15 mph. After some time surveyed journalists rushed up close. The airbags were steaming and the XC90 interior stammered the horrifying smell of an electrical fire.

But Volvo executives claimed that had someone been in the S40, which is protected by side airbags and curtains, he or she might have seen bruises or a broken rib to think the worst, but probably would not have been hospitalized. At that time the danger of building cars with below average safety clearly known to the observers.

There are plenty of opportunities in the auto industry for companies other than Volvo to consider safety a top selling point. But only a few are doing so. Four of the five cars on the list was created by Ford and its subsidiaries, one is a Honda, from its luxury Acura division, included in this list.

All vehicles hired got the highest rating (five stars) in each crash-test category. The cars included were the NHTSA tested in each of the available methods: two frontal-impact tests, two side-impact tests and a rollover resistance test. To be fair, the list's short partly attributed to the fact that NHTSA does not crash-test all cars on the market, nor does it involve each car tests through each test it holds.

It tries to test a wide range of vehicles, but agrees it does not have enough resources to do each one. The cars not tested in 2005 include Chevrolet Corvette from General Motors (NYSE: GM - news - people), the Phaeton from Volkswagen and Audi A6. Although this is the case, the reality is that security is not currently a top requirement for most automakers worldwide.