Check out the American and European Top Safety Pick+ winners on the IIHS leaderboard, and you find that the list skews toward luxury cars. Audi and BMW hold plenty of awards between them, but there isn't a single Ford or Chevy holding the IIHS' top award this year. It's not just about crashworthiness anymore. Earning a gold medal in safety demands excellent safety software, as well. Software which western automakers often reserve for higher trims and luxury models.This pattern doesn't seem to apply to Japanese and Korean cars, where you'll find Mazda, Honda, and Hyundai scooping up awards by the armful, year after year. In fact, Nissan – producer of some of the cheapest cars on the market – actually scored a safety award in every single mainstream category this year, except for pickup trucks (where only the Tesla Cybertruck and the Toyota Tundra earned an award). Here's why the budget-friendly Japanese brand is such a leader in safety. Nissan Is Objectively Safer Than The Competition Nissan Many awards are opinion-based. There's no real objectivity to the Oscars, for instance, it's just the collective opinions of the committee. That's not the case with IIHS safety awards, which are handed out based strictly on measurable crash test results. Earning the Insurance Institute's gold medal this year means that a car met the following criteria. Good rating in small overlap front test. Good rating in moderate overlap front test. Good rating in side impact test. Acceptable or good headlights in the standard trim. Good pedestrian crash prevention in the standard trim. Acceptable or good vehicle-to-vehicle crash prevention according to new testing system, in the standard trim. "Standard trim" is the key word there. The IIHS' goal is to make all cars on the road safer, not just the expensive ones. This means that if you have to pay extra for the peace of mind that comes with a segment-leading crash-avoidance system, you're not scoring the big one this year.Where many automakers are playing catch-up with the IIHS, Asian brands like Nissan are frequently a step ahead of the Insurance Institute. This is, in part, because it's easier to reach the international market with an industry-leading product. By staying ahead of the curve, Nissan never winds up losing time on the market because it had to reconfigure a car for, say, Sweden's notoriously strict safety standards. Nissan Has An Award-Winning Car For Every Driver Ian Wright/CarBuzz/Valnet If you're looking at winners by volume, Hyundai has actually scored seven IIHS awards in total this year, three more than Nissan. However, Hyundai doesn't have a winner in the large SUV category, where the Nissan Armada scores a Top Safety Pick for the full-size segment.This rounds out a full collection, with the brand's other awards being for a sedan, a compact crossover, and the three-row mid-size Nissan Pathfinder (the IIHS actually counts the Pathfinder as a small SUV, but it's a three-row. That's a mid-size in our book).If you're looking at this report card and wondering how the Nissan Armada came up with a silver medal despite scoring a Good in every category, the Armada's crash prevention tests are outdated. The Armada avoided a collision in almost every crash prevention test, but it hasn't been subjected to the IIHS' new vehicle-to-vehicle avoidance tests yet.All three of the Top Safety Pick+ winners scored a Good rating in pedestrian collision avoidance, and an Acceptable in vehicle-to-vehicle collision avoidance.The Armada is running the same safety software as everything else you see here, Nissan Safety Shield 360, but we can't know how the Armada's imposing three-ton curb weight affects potential crashes with the new tech until someone puts it through its paces. Infiniti Is Doing Alright This Year, Too Jared Rosenholtz/CarBuzz/Valnet Nissan's luxury sub-brand, Infiniti, only scored half as many awards this year as its parent company, but that's better than nothing, and it brings the company's total up to six wins.The QX60 is regarded as the Infiniti version of the Nissan Pathfinder, and it earned the same Acceptable/Good rating for vehicle-to-vehicle/pedestrian crash avoidance, reiterating that point we were making about Nissan not hiding their best safety tech away in the luxury trims. The Pathfinder might not be as cushy as the QX60, but it's just as safe.As for the QX80, just like the Armada, it holds a Good crash prevention rating, but it's based on an outdated test, so it's limited to a silver medal for now. The Murano Is The Safest Nissan, But The Pathfinder Is The Most Sensible Ian Wright/CarBuzz/Valnet Of the Nissans that scored a Top Safety Pick+ award this year, the Nissan Murano is the most impressive of the bunch. The Pathfinder's overall test results were Good, but it scored a few dings in areas like driver pelvis injury measures, where it earned a Marginal rating. The Nissan Sentra scored a string of Good ratings from top to bottom, excepting a pair of Acceptables for rear passenger head/neck, and thigh. Meanwhile, the Murano only scored a single Acceptable rating, for rear passenger chest injuries, in a long list of Good ratings.Ultimately, the Murano comes out ahead for its near-perfect crash-test avoidance sheet. The small SUV avoided collision in every single passenger test, and most vehicle-to-vehicle tests. Where the Murano failed to avoid, for instance, a motorcycle target, it did manage to slow its speed down to just a single mile per hour.The Nissan Murano makes a lot of sense as a family car, as it not only scored a near-perfect rating with the IIHS, it also holds a 77/100 Quality & Reliability rating with JD Power, and racks up a small annual repair bill of just $507, according to RepairPal.All of that being said, the Pathfinder might be the best family car of the bunch. It's roomier, being a three-row SUV, and, when it comes to safety, the difference between the mid-size Pathfinder and the compact Murano is marginal. The Pathfinder holds a Quality & Reliability rating of 84/100, with an annual repair bill of $542, easily overcoming the Murano's small safety lead to make for the smartest overall family car of Nissan's safety award winners. Nissan Has Always Prided Itself On Safety Ian Wright/CarBuzz/Valnet Nissan recently published a piece on its blog regarding the Nissan Sentra's Top Safety Pick+ award, boasting that "confidence comes standard" in the brand's flagship sedan. If any automaker deserves to give themselves a pat on the back like this, it's Nissan, and we'll join in the patting, too. The brand consistently stands head and shoulders above the competition.The new Sentra's revised advanced driver assistance system – with a new front camera and radar and a wider field of view and higher resolution – is the sort of thing that might only be available in the higher trim levels for an American car, but it's packed in as a standard feature in Nissan's $22,600 entry-level trims.Moving forward, safety tech is only going to become more important for automakers hoping to get in the Insurance Institute's good graces. Just about every car on the road can keep you safe in a collision with a similarly sized vehicle, but the models that can prevent that crash from happening in the first place will ultimately be the ones taking home the gold.