So if safety tests don’t prioritize female occupants, carmakers won’t necessarily make changes to better protect them.
#Dummy car accident simulation drivers#
(The female dummy sits in the driver’s seat for some side-impact tests.) This, despite the fact that women now represent almost 50 percent of drivers in the U.S., according to the FHWA.īecause automotive design is directly influenced by the results of safety testing, any bias in the way cars are crash-tested translates into the way cars are manufactured. In frontal crash tests performed for both NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, this 5th percentile female dummy either rides as a passenger or doesn’t participate in the test at all. No dummy takes into account the biological differences between male and female bodies. Even then, it’s just a scaled-down version of a male dummy that represents only the smallest 5 percent of women by the standards of the mid-1970s-so small that it can work double-duty as a 12- or 13-year-old child. Regulators asked for a female dummy in 1980, and a group of automakers petitioned for one in 1996, but it took until 2003 for NHTSA to put one in the car. This, despite the fact that cars are now routinely equipped with sophisticated safety systems, such as electronic stability control, automatic emergency braking, and blind spot detection. In fact, researchers have understood since at least the early 1980s that male and female bodies perform differently in crashes, but the vast majority of automotive safety policy and research is still designed to address the body of the so-called 50th percentile male-currently represented in crash tests by a 171-pound, 5-foot-9-inch dummy that was first standardized in the 1970s (today, the average American man is about 26 pounds heavier). “These same trends have been observed in many, many studies in the past,” says Jason Forman, Ph.D., who is a principal scientist with the Center for Applied Biomechanics at UVA and led that 2019 survey of injury disparities. These alarming numbers suggest an urgent safety issue, but the problem is neither new nor unfamiliar to regulators and automakers.
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