Both the Telluride and Expedition have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Telluride has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Expedition’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
The Kia Telluride has a standard driver’s side knee airbag mounted low on the dashboard. The knee airbag helps prevent the driver from sliding under the seatbelts or the main frontal airbag; this keeps the driver better positioned during a collision for maximum protection. A knee airbag also helps keep the legs from striking the dashboard, preventing knee and leg injuries in the case of a serious frontal collision. The Expedition doesn’t offer knee airbags.
For better protection of the passenger compartment, the Telluride uses safety cell construction with a three-dimensional high-strength frame that surrounds the passenger compartment. It provides extra impact protection and a sturdy mounting location for door hardware and side impact beams. The Expedition uses a body-on-frame design, which has no frame members above the floor of the vehicle.
Both the Telluride and the Expedition have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, height adjustable front shoulder belts, plastic fuel tanks, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, blind spot warning systems, rearview cameras, rear cross-path warning, driver alert monitors, available all wheel drive and around view monitors.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does side impact tests on new vehicles. In this test, which crashes the vehicle into a flat barrier at 38.5 MPH, results indicate that the Kia Telluride is safer than the Ford Expedition:
|
Telluride |
Expedition |
|
Front Seat |
|
STARS |
5 Stars |
5 Stars |
Chest Movement |
.5 inches |
.5 inches |
Abdominal Force |
93 lbs. |
108 lbs. |
New test not comparable to pre-2011 test results. More stars = Better. Lower test results = Better.
Instrumented handling tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and analysis of its dimensions indicate that the Telluride is 3.8% to 6.5% less likely to roll over than the Expedition.
The Kia Telluride has achieved the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) highest rating of “Top Safety Pick Plus” for the 2024 model year. This distinction is based on its exceptional performance in IIHS’ rigorous battery of safety tests. Specifically, it earned a “Good” rating in the latest, more stringent moderate overlap front crash test, a “Good” result in the updated side impact test, and a “Good” score in the revised pedestrian crash prevention test. The Expedition has not yet been evaluated by the IIHS for 2024.