Pedestrian crash prevention earns safety award for Ram 1500

The 2021 Ram 1500 crew cab pickup earns a Top Safety Pick award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety when equipped with specific headlights and optional front crash prevention.

Unlike last year’s model, the 2021 Ram’s optional front crash prevention system is capable of detecting pedestrians. The system earns an advanced rating in IIHS tests.

To qualify for a 2020 Top Safety Pick award, a vehicle must earn good ratings in six crashworthiness evaluations, including the driver-side small overlap front, passenger-side small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests. It also needs advanced or superior ratings for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention and must offer acceptable- or good-rated headlights on at least one trim level.

In vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention tests, the Ram 1500 avoided collisions at both 12 mph and 25 mph. In most of the vehicle-to-pedestrian tests, it avoided hitting the pedestrian dummy or slowed substantially to mitigate the force of impact. However, the system failed to slow the vehicle at all in the 37-mph trial designed to simulate an adult pedestrian walking in the travel lane in the same direction as the vehicle.

The Ram falls short of qualifying for the higher-tier Top Safety Pick+ award, which requires good- or acceptable-rated headlights on all trims, because three out of the four available headlight packages earn marginal scores. The curve-adaptive LED projectors that come with the Laramie Longhorn, Limited and TRX trims earn a good rating. Those trims also have high-beam assist, which automatically switch between high beams and low beams, depending on the presence of other vehicles.