It's small, but it's also officially safe. The 2008 Smart fortwo micro car, the smallest car for sale in the U.S. market, has earned top scores in crash tests conducted by the insurance industry, according to the Associated Press Wednesday. It received Good ratings for both front offset and side impact collisions, and it nabbed an Acceptable rating for rear collisions.

As always, there's one important caveat: The tests, released Wednesday, show how well vehicles stack up against others of similar size and weight, the report said. The institute noted that the front-end test scores "can't be compared across weight classes, meaning a small car that earns a good rating isn't considered safer than a large car that did not earn the highest rating."

"All things being equal in safety, bigger and heavier is always better. But among the smallest cars, the engineers of the Smart did their homework and designed a high level of safety into a very small package," Adrian Lund, the institutes's president, said in the report. He said that the Smart makes good especially sense in congested urban areas where the likelihood of a high-speed, severe accident is very small. (Read the full Smart fortwo IIHS ratings here.)