The aluminum-bodied Ford F-150 SuperCrew aced all the crash tests and earned the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Top Safety Pick award, but the Extended Cab variant has a few issues Ford might want to correct for next year.
Here’s the backstory: the IIHS first tested the F-150 SuperCrew in April, but a re-test was ordered after Automotive News pointed out that only the SuperCrew model has protective bars in front of and behind each front wheel. Here are the results of that re-test.
Ford has to deal with a lot of skepticism and a big pile of GM’s bullshit marketing since the all aluminum-bodied F-150 hit the streets, and with slow sales and horror service stories like this in the air, the least they could get was a top safety rating to show everybody that these pickups are just as strong as any of the steel-bodied competition.
The SuperCrew didn’t disappoint:
The Extended Cab version also performed well in almost all tests except for the front small overlap crash, which is pretty brutal to most vehicles, even new ones.
But the SuperCrew has extra frame components that the Extended Cab is missing, and that really shows on video because the latter ended up with its pedals, its steering column and its dummy’s head in all the wrong places:
Ford told the Institute that they’re studying the possibilities of making changes to the Extended Cab. Via Automotive News again:
In an e-mailed response to questions from Automotive News, Ford spokesman Mike Levine said Ford will add “countermeasures to the SuperCab and Regular Cab for the 2016 model year. The type of countermeasure and structure will vary by cab type.”
The IIHS also looked into repair costs by running a 2014 F-150 into the back of a 2015 F-150, and vice versa. They found that the 2015 Ford F-150 was 26 percent more expensive to fix in total than its steel-bodied predecessor.
Personally, I can’t wait for the carbon fiber bodied version to come out. Maybe in 2030.
Photo credit: IIHS
Contact the author at mate@jalopnik.com.