The Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86 don’t retain their safety-oriented bragging rights for 2024.
Car buyers tend to stick to certain criteria when hunting for sports cars. Performance car fans want power, presence, speed, looks, or back-to-basics driving dynamics. Seldom, however, do they prioritize safety. That said, even the safest sports cars from years past didn’t make the list of IIHS Top Safety Picks for 2024.
The former safest sports cars in the small car segment are nowhere to be found on the list of winners for 2024
If you’re taking a look at the Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86 and scratching your head, don’t worry. You’re not seeing double. The two sports cars are mechanical siblings born of a partnership between Japanese automakers Subaru and Toyota. Of course, popular scuttlebutt suggests that Toyota may scrap the partnership in the future and strap a turbo onto its diminutive sports coupe.
However, what car buyers likely didn’t expect of the boxer-powered twins is a claim to being the safest sports cars in the small car segment. In 2022, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) awarded the Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86 the agency’s coveted Top Safety Pick + rating. Of all the sports coupes on the market, the BRZ and GR86 are a couple of the only ones to snag the top-mark rating.
Of course, for performance car shoppers concerned with safety ratings, the Volkswagen Golf R also snagged a Top Safety Pick + rating. However, unlike the GR86 and BRZ, the Golf R is a sensible, all-wheel drive (AWD) four-door hatchback, not a put-the-fun-in-fundamental RWD coupe.
Furthermore, the 2023 Audi A5 Coupe matches the safest sports cars from Subaru and Toyota. That said, the larger, more expensive Audi coupe is hardly a comparable nameplate to the sub-$33,000 siblings.
In 2022, the BRZ and GR86 earned “good” ratings in every crashworthiness, crash avoidance, and crash mitigation category. However, the sibling sports cars, despite scoring among the three safest sports coupes of 2022 and 2023, didn’t register on the IIHS’s list of Top Safety Picks for 2024. Despite “good” ratings in every category but “LATCH ease of use” in the seat belts & child restraints category, the twins didn’t earn the 2024 top rating.
