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How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing?

Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks.

Unfortunately, if we get into a car accident, we don't get to ask the driver of the vehicle we're colliding with to change their location, angle of impact, and speed, in order for the collision to comply with an IIHS, NHTSA, or*NCAP, test protocol. There are some things that complicate this, e.g., if looking at Toyota, the Yaris is actually a re-branded Mazda2, so perhaps that shouldn't be considered as part of a pooled test result, and doing this kind of statistical analysis is beyond the scope of this post. From other backchannel discussions, it sounds like BMW is relatively serious about the software side of safety, for a car company, but the lack of rigor in this kind of testing would be horrifying to someone who's seen a release process for something like a mainstream CPU.

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