The infamous small overlap test.


Overall evaluation: Poor

That looks like, "get into a car accident and you die." The driver's area completely collapses, the head hits the wheel/dashboard before the airbags deploy too. Not very impressive at all. Makes me far less likely to buy the Encore.

Does it change your mind about the Encore at all?

well.. if you get into an accident similar to a small overlap you will die.

a regular front collision is fine. the Encore does fine in the other tests. its just this one where it fails in.

This test came out because of people falling asleep behind the wheel and crashing into a parked or stopped car or even worse a tractor trailer which would end as bad as what's seen above. So just make sure you're wide awake and alert when driving.

I think that the test also represents hitting a pole, or tree, or rear ending people. Basically it is if you turn at the last moment to try to avoid the crash but end up hitting it anyway. It seems to me that this is a common type of crash.

Buick must be trying to figure out how to improve upon this because it is not acceptable.

so the lesson is

if you drive an Encore (or any new car that sucks at the small overlap)

just go straight into the tree or pole. Dont avoid it

what ever Mercedes is doing, Buick needs to start doing it, just look how good the new Mercedes ML did in the frontal overlap crash test:

I think that part of what makes the Benz better in this test is that it has a long front end which gives more of a buffer before the crash start to affect the area where the driver sits. I think this is a reason why smaller cars tend to do worse in crash tests often. How did Buick not know that the Encore would do so poorly on the small overlap test?

longer front end and almost double the size. its a Mercedes M class...

A better comparison would be the GLA.

I don't think that the GLA has gone through crash testing yet so its an unknown at the moment. I did look up the RAV 4 though as I thought that would be a comparable vehicle. It also got a poor rating. Doesn't look quite so bad as the Encore, but it still looks really bad.