Cybertruck Is the Only 2026 Pickup to Earn the IIHS Top Safety Pick+

The Tesla Cybertruck just earned the highest safety rating the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety hands out.

It is the only large pickup in the 2026 class to take home a Top Safety Pick+ badge.

That is the truck critics called a rolling deathtrap when it was first unveiled. The crash data tells a different story.

In IIHS pedestrian front crash prevention tests, @Cybertruck avoided every single collision – daytime, nighttime & different angles
 
It was also the only pickup to earn Top Safety Pick+ (highest award) in 2026https://t.co/BNPqT9TbsW pic.twitter.com/M6nwDisBFK

— Tesla (@Tesla) June 24, 2026

The IIHS rating page gives the official scorecard, and it is the kind of sheet Tesla fans wanted to see. Cybertruck earned Good marks, the top grade, in small overlap front, updated moderate overlap front, updated side, headlights, vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention 2.0, and pedestrian front crash prevention.

The build-date note matters too. IIHS says the small-overlap and moderate-overlap crash ratings apply to 2025 and 2026 Cybertrucks built after April 2025, after Tesla changed the front underbody structure and footwell areas to improve occupant protection.

For the newer 2026 vehicle-to-vehicle front-crash-prevention test, IIHS lists the standard system at Good across the Cybertruck line. In passenger-car target testing, the truck avoided collisions at 31, 37, and 43 mph in both centered and off-center runs.

The scorecard has two caveats, and they are worth saying plainly. The seat belt reminder system drew a Marginal rating, and the LATCH child-seat anchors landed at Acceptable.

But the core crash and crash-avoidance categories that drive the award came back Good. That is why the Cybertruck is wearing the plus badge instead of merely showing up somewhere in the pickup chart.

The pickup-class comparison is where this gets interesting.

The IIHS large pickups summary makes the comparison even clearer. In the captured 2026 large-pickup list, Cybertruck is the only model wearing Top Safety Pick+, while the Toyota Tundra crew cab earns the lower Top Safety Pick award.

The category gets rough after that. Ford F-150 and Ram 1500 crew cabs each show a Poor mark on the updated moderate overlap front test.

Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500 crew cabs each show Marginal in small overlap front, and neither one gets either IIHS award in the summary.

The Rivian R1T, the other electric pickup in the group, performs well in several areas, but it still does not match the Cybertruck’s award line. The bigger pattern is Tesla clearing the newest top-award bar in a pickup class where most trucks did not.

Teslarati framed the June 24 result around the fresh Tesla post and the same IIHS comparison. Its report points to the Cybertruck’s Good crashworthiness marks, Good pedestrian front-crash-prevention result, and the fact that Toyota Tundra stopped at the lower award while Ford and Ram missed the award list entirely.

The report also ties the award back to the older skepticism around the Cybertruck’s shape and stainless-steel body. The useful point is narrow but strong: after years of arguing over the design, IIHS data now gives Cybertruck the top U.S. pickup award for 2026.

Tesla posted the win on X the same day, and the company leaned especially hard into the pedestrian test results.

🚨 Cybertruck just proved it’s one of the safest pickups on the road.
In the latest IIHS pedestrian front crash prevention tests, the Cybertruck avoided every single collision — daytime, nighttime, and from different angles.
It’s also the only pickup truck to earn the highest…

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) June 24, 2026

The pedestrian testing is the part owners keep pointing to.

Not a Tesla App walked through the full scorecard and the pedestrian collision-avoidance results, where the Cybertruck avoided every staged impact across daytime, nighttime, and multiple approach angles.

That is the same charge skeptics led with early on, that the truck’s hard edges made it dangerous to people on foot. The standard automatic system answered it.

One caution worth keeping straight. This is the highest IIHS award among 2026 large pickups, not a global declaration that nothing on any road anywhere is safer.

European and UK pedestrian-protection rules are written differently, and they are a separate conversation. Inside the standard IIHS battery, though, the Cybertruck stands at the top of its class with the award no other large pickup earned this year.