Realtors have this saying that the value of a property is down to location, location, location. It's pretty much the same when it comes to vehicles. If you like those small red things without anti-roll bars that feature in movies like Gone in Sixty Seconds, it's going to cost you a small fortune to put its wheels on the road. But if you are content to putter along at a steady speed in an family saloon, your premium rates just got highly affordable. The make and model is everything. However, even within the powered, underpowered range, there's a more important issue. When it comes to designing the modern vehicle, it's rather more than a simple box on wheels. There's an increasing amount of engineering to make you safer. By "you", we don't just mean the driver. In days gone by, the passengers were just collateral damage in the war zone. Now, there's a real investment in keeping everyone inside the vehicle as safe as possible.

So, welcome to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) which earns its keep by running crash tests and doing all the other things to discover just how safe the vehicles are that we drive every day. The good news for you is a simple truth. People in vehicles that do well in the cash tests are far less likely to die in an real-world accident. This is not just about airbags although they are useful added protection. This is about the physical structure of the cage which holds us. There must be a balance between rigid bones and areas designed to crumple to absorb the impact. In this remember that there are passengers in the back seats to think about. Ironically, the federal statistics do forget this, largely calculating fatality and injury statistics on drivers and front-seat passengers only, i.e. they tend to assume front- rather than side-impact collisions. This is flat wrong. In 2009, 27% of rear passenger deaths occurred in side-impact crashes.

So, insurers look at the IIHS crash test results with great interest and set their premium rates accordingly. The safer the vehicle, the less likely it is there will be big claims for personal injuries or deaths arising from collisions. This means the rates can be lower. But if your sporty open-topped speedster rolls over, you could lose your head and present everyone with a big money claim to fight over. In this case, cheap car insurance really is about using your head (and that's not just to make your mark on the road). You have to do your research and buy the vehicle with the safest crash test results. Of course not everyone can afford to go out and buy new. That's the good things about the IIHS. They have the results going back years so you can always find the safest vehicle in your price bracket. Then it's just a matter of running the search engine to get as many quotes as possible. The trick is to find the cheap car insurance for the car you are willing to be seen driving. Ego gives way to practicality and gives you affordable insurance.