Jalopnik:

You’ve seen the annual “Top Safety Pick” car ads and the crash-test videos, with cars slammed into objects as their own debris pours down around them like a snowstorm. Perhaps the latter even convinced you not to buy a car you so desperately wanted.

But that’s just a small part of determining which vehicles on the market are safe and which fall short—a long, messy process full of bulk vehicle purchases, bulk trips to the salvage yard, and automakers’ attempts to go back and fix what they didn’t get right the first time.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating. There’s some really interesting details into how the major organizations perform their testing.