When building and designing vehicles, car-makers keep in mind how the car will hold up in a crash. While they might plan for a crash - they can’t be sure how the car will actually perform. The only way to ensure a car handles a real life accident safely is to test in-the-wild.

The major problem with testing a car’s safety – is that it is extremely hard to replicate an in-the-wild accident. Like software, these real-life crashes happen unplanned and often involve a number of factors.

However, according to a WPXI article there is now a solution:

“Nearly every new car does really well in standard frontal crash tests, but in the real world, people are still dying, so the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety upped the ante, designing a new test that replicates what’s happening on the roads.

Instead of colliding head-on, in the new test the driver’s side of the vehicle strikes a barrier at 40 mph. It’s what happens when the front corner of a car collides with another vehicle or an object like a tree or utility pole.”

How did cars available hold up under this new testing? The first tests were done on luxury cars because they usually have more advanced security capabilities. Out of 11 midsized cars tested – the Acura TL and the Volvo S60 were the only cars that earned a good rating. The hope is that moving forward with real-world testing, car safety will greatly improve.