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Did they add extra bars for the purpose of gaming the tests or did they add extra bars and then whoever chose what to send for the tests picked the obvious best choice?

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They knew which configuration would be sent for the tests because IIHS required it be the most "commonly sold" config, so they picked a specific supercrew model that made up about 70% of their sales to bump up the safety on.

That's not ideal, but.... If you want more safety, you should want ford to do stuff like this. From the way it was phrased, I was imagining they added extra bars only to the actual cars sent for testing. This is them following the incentives and making their customers safer as a result; a win for safety testing.

Obviously it would be better if they had a deep commitment to safety and made every variation of every model maximally safe. But I'll take it. No such thing as absolute safety, so moves in a better direction are good.

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