Front-seat passengers in some small sport utility vehicles may not be as well protected as drivers in certain types of crashes, according to recent tests of seven vehicles by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The tests, known as small overlap frontal tests, were similar to the kind that the institute conducts by directing the front-end impact to the driver’s side of the vehicle. But in these latest tests, whose results were released on Thursday, the impact was on the S.U.V.s’ front passenger side.
