The latest FE generation 2022 Honda Civic has been inducted into USA’s Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) list of safest cars on sale there, receiving the highest Top Safety Pick+ award.

Since USA sells both sedan and hatchback variants of the Honda Civic the award applies to both body styles.

The Honda Civic scored the highest ‘Good’ rating in all Crashworthiness tests (they are six in total) while its Sensing suite of advance driver assistance scored the highest ‘Superior’ rating for collision avoidance with other vehicles as well as pedestrians.

The US market Honda Civic has a slightly different Sensing package, including Traffic Jam Assist (TJA). This feature combines Low Speed Follow with Lane Keeping Assist, allowing the vehicle to self-centre even at crawling speeds.

TJA is not part of IIHS’ test, which only considers AEB (CMBS in Honda’s term), so for the sake of argument, yes it’s reasonable to draw a direct link with Civic models sold in Malaysia.

However it should be noted that a vehicle’s body structure may differ from one market to another, due to specific regulation requirements for each market, so scores for crashworthiness cannot be applied to our local cars.

For example, USA insists on doing a small overlap front collisions test, where only 25 percent of the car’s frontal section hits a static, non-deformable barrier. The Europeans say this test is silly because it’s not reflective of actual crash scenarios and puts unnecessary strain on just one small part of the car.

The Europeans at EuroNCAP however, do a mobile deformable barrier collision, travelling at 50 km/h, hitting 50 percent of the car’s frontal section. They say this is a better representation of actual scenarios of multi-car collision.

Although NCAP is not a regulatory requirement, cars sold in different markets need to be adapted to the local norms and expectations, and a body structure that’s optimized for one particular type of crash test may not do so well in another.

This is why you can’t use safety ratings in other countries as a reference for cars sold in our local market.

For our market, tests by ASEAN NCAP, which is part of the Global NCAP organization that also includes EuroNCAP, is the most accurate assessment.

Also read: 5-Star ASEAN NCAP rating for Malaysia-bound 2022 Honda Civic FE