UL Solutions has been a cornerstone in safety testing for over a century, starting with fire and safety evaluations for electrical products as electricity became common in homes. Today, its logo signifies safety across a vast array of consumer electronics.
Reliability is broadly defined by how often your car experiences unscheduled failures or malfunctions. A car that is more likely to experience failures is considered unreliable, whereas one that can go for 150,000 miles with nothing but regular maintenance would be considered reliable.
For three decades, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has been smashing vehicles with an adult-sized dummy sitting in the front seat, simulating a type of head-on collision where two vehicles are slightly offset. It's always been a challenging test, above and beyond the minimum standards that car companies are legally required to meet. The IIHS conducts tests and independently awards safety ratings that are meant to reward companies for superior safety, well exceeding minimum standards.
The National Safety Council recently estimated that U.S. traffic deaths plummeted by nearly 5,000 between 2024 and 2025 - a 12-percent drop, and the largest single-year decline since at least 1999. That estimate still means that 37,810 people lost their lives in car crashes last year - a horrifying number, but the lowest one published by NSC since 2019.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced an end Thursday to credits to automakers who install automatic start-stop ignition systems in their vehicles, a device intended to reduce emissions that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said everyone hates. In remarks with President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House, Zeldin called start-stop technology the Obama switch and said it makes vehicles die at every red light and stop sign. He said the credits, which also applied to options like improved air conditioning systems, are now over, done, finished.
Car seat misuse rates are pretty high right now. According to data from the National Digital Car Seat Check Form (NDCF), 74% of the almost 60,000 car seats that child passenger safety technicians (CPSTs) checked in 2025 were not being used as the manufacturer intended. The top culprits? Misused seat belts, harnesses and tethers.
At Stellantis headquarters, driving a company car gets you the best parking spots - but driving anything else can get you the boot. When the Jeep parent company ordered employees back to the office five days a week at its Auburn Hills, Michigan campus, workers discovered that parking a Tesla or Hyundai in a spot reserved for Stellantis vehicles could earn them a ticket from security.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said on Thursday that it has upgraded the probe it launched in October 2024 to what's known as an "engineering analysis," its highest level of scrutiny. It's a step that is often required before the agency tells a company to issue a recall.
Some 337,000 cars, 29,000 of them in Germany, covering five different models are "potentially concerned" by the safety issue, which concerns incorrect routing of the dashboard wiring, said the KBA. The recall concerns the i5, 5, M5, i7 and 7 models built between June 2022 and December 2025.
Honda and DriveOhio have teamed up on a new road safety initiative in which Honda vehicles are being used to collect real-time data that can advise about potential issues and road deficiencies before they become a problem. Honda's Proactive Roadway Maintenance System, which has been in prototyping since 2021, uses "advanced vision and LiDAR sensors" to identify issues such as worn or obstructed road signs, damaged guardrails, rough roads and emerging potholes.
As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car. Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today's interconnected, software-defined vehicles.
