The evolution of safety features in cars has seen a drastic evolution over the past decade and with that comes more stringent testing from organizations such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). If manufacturers don't keep up with offering the latest standard of equipment, their safety ratings are sure to fall drastically. The Honda group understands this and has been rewarded with top ratings for nine of its products, three of which fall under the Acura banner.

The Acura MDX, RDX, and TLX are joined by the Honda Accord, Civic Hatch and Sedan, Insight, and Odyssey in achieving the IIHS's Top Safety Pick+ rating. The CR-V earns the standard Top Safety Pick when equipped with specific headlights. A large reason for this impressive result is that both manufacturers include their AcuraWatch or HondaSensing advanced driver assist systems as a standard feature.

Included in these packages are its active emergency brake assist with pedestrian detection, forward collision warning, lane departure warning with mitigation, lane-keeping assist, and adaptive cruise control. The inclusion of this earns its cars a "superior" rating for vehicle-to-vehicle frontal crash prevention. The offering is already so capable but the engineers at Honda are still working hard on improving its functionalities. The IIHS notes that out of 65 Safety Top Pick+ winners, only two cars were not equipped with front crash prevention technology.

Crash testing is a major criterion for the IIHS's Top Safety Pick awards which the Acura and Honda products aced. All nine cars were awarded the highest possible "good" rating in all six criteria consisting of the small overlap front section for the driver and passenger, moderate overlap front, side, roof, and head restraints and seats.

All Acura and Honda products are constructed with an Advanced Compatibility Engineering body structure that has been designed with the protection of occupants in mind. The design has been described to consider a variety of collisions from all angles and uses safeguards such as pre-tensioning front seatbelts, and front, side, knee, and side-curtain airbags to further ensure the safety of passengers in the event of a crash.

It looks like these designs and features have paid off for the Japanese carmaker, not only with the IIHS. For the NHTSA's 2022 NCAP testing, all of Honda's cars attained a five-star overall score.

While Honda delivered some exemplary safety results for this year's round of IIHS tests but it was the Hyundai Motor Group that scored the most awards in their respective categories, besting the likes of the Volkswagen Group and Volvo.