Ford aluminum body pickup gets mixed results in crash test - whnt.com
Both versions were subjected to the new small overlap front crash test. The larger Ford F-150 SuperCrew version of the truck has additional structures that helped protect the passenger compartment during the test. “Consumers who wondered whether the aluminum-body F-150 would be as crash-worthy as its steel-body predecessor can consider the question answered,” said David Zuby, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety chief researcher, in a statement. The Insurance Institute was originally going to test only the larger SuperCrew truck because that’s the most popular version of the truck. After learning of the structural differences from other versions of the truck, though, the Institute decided to test the smaller version as well. In the future, the Institute will test more than one version of large pickups like the F-150, the Institute said. When this crash test was introduced in 2012, the new F-150 was already far into development, Ford spokesman Mike Levine said. Engineers weren’t able to design the extra front-end protective measures quickly enough for all versions, he said, so a decision was made to add them first to the four-door SuperCrew truck, which accounts for a large majority of F-150 sales. Source: whnt.com
