Two new small SUVs from Toyota earn 2020 safety awards
October 23, 2020
The new Toyota Venza and Toyota RAV4 Prime, both small SUVs, qualify for 2020 Top Safety Pick awards from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety when equipped with specific headlights.
Both the Venza, a conventional hybrid, and the RAV4 Prime, a plug-in hybrid, were introduced for the 2021 model year, though the Venza name was used for an earlier model that was discontinued in 2015. Both vehicles are built on the same platform as the RAV4.
Photo courtesy of Toyota Motor North America
To qualify for a Top Safety Pick award, a vehicle must earn good ratings in six crashworthiness evaluations, including the driver-side small overlap front, passenger-side small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests. It also needs advanced or superior ratings for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention and must offer acceptable- or good-rated headlights on at least one trim level.
To qualify for the higher-tier Top Safety Pick+ award, all the available headlights must be rated good or acceptable.
The LED projectors that come on the Venza’s XLE and Limited trims earn an acceptable rating, but the LED reflectors that come on the LE trim earn a marginal rating due to inadequate illumination on left curves.
The curve-adaptive LED projector headlights offered on the RAV4 Prime as part of the Premium package on the XSE trim earn a good rating, but the base LED projectors earn a poor rating due to inadequate illumination on curves.
Both SUVs come with a standard front crash prevention system that earns superior ratings in the Institute’s vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian evaluations. In the vehicle-to-vehicle test, both models avoided collisions at 12 and 25 mph. In the vehicle-to-pedestrian evaluation, they avoided hitting the dummy or slowed substantially to mitigate the force of impact in all three of the tests designed to simulate common pedestrian crashes.