Tundra

Make
Toyota
Segment
Sports Car

Vehicle safety has been at the forefront of countless marketing campaigns, and manufacturers continue to spend billions developing new tech that aims to keep us fragile meat sacks alive and well. This obsession with safety has bled into every corner of the car market, including the traditionally gung-ho truck market. Most people rely on the sheer size of pickup trucks to offer some sort of buffer, but most trucks have come a long way in terms of improved safety levels, some more so than others.

The Toyota Tundra has long been one of the safest trucks on the market and was one of the only trucks to pass a recently introduced test held by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Now, this same truck has managed to score a Top Safety Pick+ award from the same institute, a first for trucks.

The Toyota Tundra is one tough truck; in fact, Toyota engineers built this thing to last over a million miles, and despite some recent recalls, it's still one of America's favorite trucks, and now it's the safest too. The 2022 Toyota Tundra crew cab, classified as a large pickup, earned the title thanks to safety improvements made by Toyota that address some of the issues the IIHS has had with the car in previous tests. In order to gain this envious title, Toyota improved on the pickup's small overlap front crash results and fitted superior headlights. The former surely required extensive fine-tuning and redevelopment.

The IIHS sets very high standards, and to take home a Top Safety Pick+ award, cars need to earn Good ratings in six IIHS crashworthiness evaluations. These evaluations include moderate front overlap, driver and passenger side small overlap, roof strength, and head restraints. In addition, vehicles that make the cut need to be available with a front crash prevention system that scores Advanced or Superior ratings in the daylight vehicle-to-pedestrian and vehicle-to-vehicle evaluations. On top of that, vehicles also require a Good or Acceptable rating for their headlights across all trim levels. Last year, the Tundra fell short of the award due to Marginal or Poor ratings for the driver and passenger-side small overlap tests and for a pair of crappy headlights.

The 2022 Toyota Tundra is fitted with a slew of advanced driver assistance systems and traditional safety tech. Toyota's Safety Sense 2.5 suite includes a pre-collision system with pedestrian detection, full-speed range dynamic radar cruise control, lane departure alert with steering assist, lane tracing assist, automatic high beams, and road sign assist. In addition, each truck also comes with a blind spot monitor with rear cross-traffic alert, trailer merge warning, and front and rear parking assist with automatic braking. This is a significant win for Toyota, and competitors will be frothing at the mouth to take this title in the coming years.