A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62877930

by Brajeshwar • 4 years ago

174 219 4 years ago

bbc.com

cumshitpiss• 4 years ago

Cool, crazy this wasn't done sooner

mythhouse3• 4 years ago

but the currently available test dummies don’t reflect the average female body

Do they reflect average american body though, male or female.

Their dummy is 5-foot-3 and weighs about 137 pounds, per the publication.

"The average American woman weighs 170.6 pounds and stands at 63.7 inches (almost 5 feet, 4 inches) tall. And the average waist circumference? It's 38.6 inches." Per google.

Looks like the male dummy actually reflects average American woman in weight at 171.

voxic11• 4 years ago

Using only averages can lead to pretty misleading results. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

hirundo• 4 years ago

Which is a good argument for using a range of test values, not for using less representative values.

Tade0• 4 years ago

According to this:

https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/

That female dummy would have been in the 24th weight percentile, while the male in the 57th female weight percentile.

randomcarbloke• 4 years ago

exacty, they shoud be testing the heaviest, tallest, and the shortest, lightest.

vxNsr• 4 years ago

Asking about avg isn’t a great idea, you really want the modal, which might be near the avg but may not be. This was an issue that came up when they tried to design the optimal fighter cockpit in WWII, they designed a cockpit that fit no one well.

KarlKode• 4 years ago

I think you mean the median.

MichaelCollins11• 4 years ago

If there's no average male pilot, there's certainly no average driver, male or female. If tests with dummies are to be useful, they have to be interpreted as abstract results, not assumed to correspond 1:1 with what any individual human body would do.

This "female" test dummy won't actually be representative of most drivers, just as the "male" test dummy isn't. Neither for men nor for women. I'm sure the people who interpret the test results understand this already of course.

prydwen2• 4 years ago

A woman is not just 'a smaller male'. Male dummies do not take into account female's different weight distribution, muscle mass etc.

This is one of the reasons why women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash. The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

treis2• 4 years ago

Dummies don't take muscles or weight distribution into account. They're metal skeletons with rubber bodies over them.

This is one of those discrimination situations where the truth is actually the exact opposite of what is reported. The dummies tested are 4'11 95 pounds and 5'9" 171 pounds. If the extremes pass then it's likely everyone in between is fine. The people who aren't covered are those above 5'9" or 171 pounds which skews heavily male.

jefftk4• 4 years ago

women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash

I don't think that's right, at least not as stated? Many more men die in car crashes than women: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Men tend to be in crashes that are more severe than women, though, probably because men are more likely to speed and drive drunk. If you try to look at crashes of equal severity (which is always a bit fraught since you don't have a real control group) then you do see something like what you're describing, though the NHTSA thinks this is mostly due to how robust men vs women are on average and not car design: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811766.PDF

hammock• 4 years ago

What do you suppose is the error introduced by weight distribution differences, as opposed to the dummy being 40lbs (29%) too light?

stickfigure2• 4 years ago

women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash

Can you cite an academic reference for this? I'm suspicious, but genuinely curious.

float4• 4 years ago

The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

I asked for this book for my birthday and read it. However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

She wrote a solid 3-4 pages on large phones and it was just surreal to read. Paraphrased:

Phones are very large. This is bad for women; they have smaller hands. Nobody knows why tech companies make large phones. It is very silly, because women actually use their phones more than men. I asked multiple tech journalists for an explanation, they had no idea either. Here I present some theories that can tie this issue to sexism: companies simply design phones with men in mind, companies expect women to carry a handbag all the time so a large phone is no bother, and so on. And sure, women could buy an iPhone SE but that model hasn't been updated in two years.

Nothing about better battery life, nothing about better media consumption. It was so confusing, as every tech journalist, literally every tech journalist, knows that bigger phones have better battery life.

Sadly it made it a bit difficult for me to fully trust the rest of the book.

anikom15• 4 years ago

Absolute weight is more important in a crash test scenario. If your proportions are correct, but the weight is far off, that’s going to be much worse than having incorrect proportions with the correct weight.

anotherman554• 4 years ago

I don't how they chose the dummy size and weight but they seem to do crash dummies based on median bodies, not "average" bodies, and the researchers who made the female dummy were Swedish so presumably wouldn't care about American sizes.

mythhouse3• 4 years ago

NHTSA uses the word average not median.

988747• 4 years ago

So the average American woman looks like a ball chair, basically? Something is wrong with your data here :)

alistairSH4• 4 years ago

The average women's clothing size is now 16 or 18 (up from 12 or 14 in 2010). It corresponds to about a 38" waist. Average height is around 5'4", which has been mostly consistent over the last 20 years.

That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.

MichaelCollins11• 4 years ago

Average fitness levels vary a lot with region, if you stick to a few trendy coastal cities you might get the impression that most Americans are fairly fit. But if you travel across America a few times, I think you'll find that ball-shaped is actually quite common.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

It's one of those bi-modal distributions, I imagine.

Centers For Disease Control:

"The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%)."

michaelt4• 4 years ago

170 lbs 5'4" looks like this: https://height-weight-chart.com/504-170.html

Certainly not an athletic build, and a borderline-obese BMI, but well short of ball chair territory.

ilyt3• 4 years ago

Stats on car accident injury rate vs BMI would be interesting but I'd imagine something like "the fatter the safer" (up to some level) would be the conclusion and so testing on skinnier model is harsher and will result in better safety.

klyrs• 4 years ago

The heavier a person is, the more kinetic energy they have. Moreover, seatbelts don't really stop a person until flesh is sufficiently compressed against bone. From that, I'd reason that skinny people should have a higher survival rate. Intuition be damned, data is important.

It shouldn't be hard to spec and built crash test dummies with simulated fat.

dmkirwan• 4 years ago

If you were shocked that this is only happening now, I'd highly recommend reading or listening to the book "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez. She highlights instances of this across many industries. I think that it's particularly relevant to software engineers, or anybody else who has a chance of unintentionally introducing bias into a system.

prydwen2• 4 years ago

+1, this book was an eye opener and a bit of a slap in the face

chroma• 4 years ago

I disagree. If you get to a part of the book where you have some knowledge of the industry she's criticizing, it's clear how mistaken is. For example, her bit about phone sizes was glaringly bad. She thinks that every phone manufacturer is sexist and builds large phones which don't work as well with women's smaller hands. While the hand size thing is obviously true, women prefer larger phones because larger phones have better battery life, better hardware specs, and better cameras. And since most women carry purses, their phone choice isn't constrained by pocket sizes.

If women really did want smaller phones, then the iPhone Mini would have sold far more than it did. But phone size is a tradeoff, and smaller phones are a niche product due to their worse specs. It's as simple as that. No industry-wide sexism is involved.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

I'm pretty much floored that they haven't been using female measured test dummies for years now. Are women's lives really valued so cheaply?

maerF0x04• 4 years ago

Yeah, so much so that they live something like 7 years longer on average. /s

shuntress2• 4 years ago

As another comment put it, it is assumed that women are the same as "smaller men". So it is more like they are not thought of rather than "cheaply valued".

guerrilla• 4 years ago

Okay, but you'd think if they were equally valued that they'd check, no?

Sakos2• 4 years ago

I think in many aspects of life, sure, but here it could simply be something akin to how the US air force realized that the idea of "average" seating in jet planes was dangerous and completely divorced from reality, driving their push for individually customizable seating. I think it's still ubiquitous that we measure things that aren't clearly generalizable across a wider population, but we think they are.

Beltalowda4• 4 years ago

If we look at ~100 years of history with cars, I think it's fairly safe to say that no one's lives are especially valued. Leaded gasoline was introduced even though the dangers were already well understood, it had to take a massive public outcry campaign to get car manufacturers to do anything about driver safety ("Unsafe at any speed" and such), pedestrian and cyclist safety is still under-prioritized in designs, etc.

maerF0x04• 4 years ago

women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision.

It makes sense to at least measure the differences and hopefully we can find ways to improve overall safety.

However I am automatically wondering a gender disparity in outcomes is a simple issue about genetics? Average women are far less muscular and are less robust than men, it makes sense given the same forces they'd be more damaged than men. Thats going to be something you cannot fix (if you distribute the forces more evenly then both genders will still have disparate outcomes due to structural differences)

One thing that these kinds of articles never seem to address is what is an acceptable rate? To illustrate the point with arbitrary numbers is a 1% improvement worth $10B ? IDK, but that's more of the kind of effort I'd like to see from writers.

Sander_Marechal• 4 years ago

IIRC a similar study was done in Europe. The conclusion was that women are indeed more likely to die or sustain serious injuries, but that the cause of that was that woman, on average, drive smaller cars. So, they are more vulnerable in a collision.

Just look around you. How often do you see families where the man is driving the big fancy SUV and the woman is driving the smaller "second" car?

yamtaddle3• 4 years ago

Just look around you. How often do you see families where the man is driving the big fancy SUV and the woman is driving the smaller "second" car?

Maybe it's a regional thing, but around here the big SUV replaced the minivan as a "women's car". I hear safety (i.e. wanting to "win" in a crash, often phrased exactly like that) as a common reason for the choice.

Their husband will drive a similarly-huge truck, usually.

MichaelCollins11• 4 years ago

In my experience in America, women prefer huge SUVs while men prefer more sporty cars, or trucks. Huge SUVs are slightly feminine because they're good for getting the kids to soccer practice. SUVs ate the market for vans, another vehicle good for moving a bunch of kids around.

That's just my observations. The data might say otherwise.

bombcar6• 4 years ago

In many cases the woman drives the "mom van" (minivan or SUV) to shuttle kids around, and the man drives "the car" (usually a sedan of some sort) to work and back each day.

With all these studies it's very important to correct for various differences and interpret the data. I suspect Volvo, for example, has a pretty good idea on these things (because they wouldn't compare all vehicle but particular models, etc).

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

IIRC a similar study was done in Europe. The conclusion was that women are indeed more likely to die or sustain serious injuries, but that the cause of that was that woman, on average, drive smaller cars. So, they are more vulnerable in a collision.

Was the more to it? If they are aware of this fact, it feels like it would be trivial to control for it, to determine whether women are still more vulnerable in the same types of vehicles.

MichaelCollins11• 4 years ago

I suspect you're right. Efforts to make cars safer for women will succeed, but at the same time they'll also make cars even safer for men. The 'average' man is able to survive more physical trauma than the average woman, because the average man has denser bones, muscles, etc. Consider that 4x as many women than men have osteoporosis. Disparities like that will lay a heavy finger on crash data.

jefftk4• 4 years ago

To illustrate the point with arbitrary numbers is a 1% improvement worth $10B ?

The NHTSA uses estimates for "Statistical Value of Life and Injuries" and "Value of Travel Time": https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/economic-values-u...

For 2021 they value a life at $11.8M: https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

Very roughly, if your 1% improvement cost $10B/y, the NHTSA would consider it worth it if it averted at least 847 (10B/11.8M) annual deaths.

maerF0x04• 4 years ago

Cool! I never knew that. Thanks for the great comment!

kulahan• 4 years ago

I dunno that there's necessarily an acceptable rate so much as everyone's just aiming to get the rate to "lower than it is now" while keeping costs acceptable and reasonable.

As for: "gender disparity in outcomes is a simple issue about genetics?"

There's an easy way to find out!

It might be possible to a small adjustment could help bring the disparity down without necessarily increasing the danger to men. I think it's worth looking in to (not to imply that you were saying it isn't).

cameronh90• 4 years ago

There are interesting stats from TfL in London. Women make approximately 25% of bicycle trips in London, but account for about 40% of the fatalities. Yet when you compare KSI (killed or seriously injured) by gender, men are more likely to be KSI for a given distance travelled.

It's hard to interpret these statistics. I suspect there are significant behavioural differences, such as riding at different times of day and at different speeds, which account for some of the differences.

quietbritishjim• 4 years ago

Sounds like a classic case of Simpson's paradox [1]. Here's how it could work, but I've made everything up so might not be true at all - it's just an example of how those numbers could exist:

* KSI goes up far less than expected as the journey length goes up (less than linearly, and maybe even down slightly between some categories). That's because the longer journeys are made by much more experienced cyclists - by definition, a very unfit cyclist never cycles 25miles, for example.

* But the category of very shortest journeys makes up by far the largest proportion of journeys, so a straight unweighted averages of KSI across journey length categories would give a very unrepresentative view.

* Those women that do cycle tend to be in the lower journey length categories because on average, women are less physically fit.

In other words, women would tend to be in the relatively more dangerous category of shorter journey length. It's not more dangerous because it's shorter - it's more dangerous because you had to be less fit to be in it in the first place.

Again, note that the above is all made up. But it shows how you could get to the contrdictory-sounding stats of the parent comment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

maerF0x04• 4 years ago

there are significant behavioural differences

And i would bet that normal characteristics of testosterone would explain a sizable portion of the difference.

drak0n1c• 4 years ago

Women have less bone density and less muscle mass than men. In an equivalent physical trauma situation they are more likely to be hurt than men, as both the physical reaction in the face of danger is less agile/powerful and the body is more fragile. Both of these apply even moreso when controlling a bicycle, because of the more direct control nuances and the greater force disparity (exposure to cars and obstacles around you).

yafinder• 4 years ago

Now I wonder what about children? Do they have different dummies for different ages and different car seat sizes? If not, what's the equivalent of

women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash
and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries

for children?

consp• 4 years ago

There is an average child test for 6 and 10 year dummies at NCAP AFAIK.

Car seat sizes should not be relevant as all children should have some form of riser/child seat to be properly protected (and never front facing on the front seat).

michaelt4• 4 years ago

According to [1] there are crash test dummies used to represent newborn, 12-month, 3-year-old, 6-year-old and 10-year-old children.

They also have a 5th-percentile adult female dummy, which is closer in height and weight to the 10-year-old dummy than to the 50th-percentile-male dummy.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

I am worried that cars are designed to pass a few really specific tests well, for example 'head on at 40 mph', 'side impact at 30 mph', but then perform much worse in a 'typical' crash, for example '37 degrees, offset by 6 inches, at 38 mph'.

I'd like to see the test methodology changed to correct this. Car manufacturers should be required to simulate what would happen in say 10,000 crash cases - with a wide variety of angles, loads, speeds, passenger types, offsets, etc. The car manufacturer should then present all those results to the NHTSA, who will then pick a few at random to test on a real car to validate the simulations.

The safety rating would be some average of performance of all the 10,000 simulated test cases, with a scaling penalty applied if the simulations didn't accurately reflect reality.

bombcar6• 4 years ago

I am worried that cars are designed to pass a few really specific tests well, for example 'head on at 40 mph', 'side impact at 30 mph', but then perform much worse in a 'typical' crash, for example '37 degrees, offset by 6 inches, at 38 mph

This is literally the case: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40824939/iihs-side-impact... (and an earlier one that was added and IIRC only Volvo did well, because Volvo was testing it before it was required: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a18737558/iihs-adds-new-fr... )

I agree that digital simulation should become an important part - including aftermath simulation from actual wrecks.

dont__panic2• 4 years ago

I wish companies had to test new cars in collisions against the smallest, most vulnerable vehicles on the road. Cars exist in a shared environment; if Ford creates a new, taller, heavier F-250, it shouldn't be allowed on the road unless there's a reasonable chance that it won't brutally crush anyone driving, say, a 2005 Honda Civic sedan around in the event of a collision.

lamontcg• 4 years ago

This was my first thought about the sex differences in accidents which is that they might reflect the average vehicle weight being driven.

Beltalowda4• 4 years ago

Also: against pedestrians and cyclists.

In fact, I'll argue that from a moral point of view it's more important to ensure the safety of people who choose to not operate a vehicle vs. those that did. Both are important of course, but this would be correct priorities. In reality the priorities are of course rather different.

tfvlrue• 4 years ago

Along those same lines, I found this an interesting read: https://danluu.com/car-safety/

hulitu• 4 years ago

Car manufacturers should be required to simulate what would happen in say 10,000 crash cases - with a wide variety of angles, loads, speeds, passenger types, offsets, etc

And how will you compare the results ? (apples with pears, SUV 40km/h 2 tonnes with small car 20km/h at 37 degree 1 ton )

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

Well every car would go through the same 10,000 simulated tests... And then they're comparable.

andrewmcwatters• 4 years ago

Specifications are important, but it's funny how you arrive at them and what defining them over time reveals even if it's obvious on its face.

When I was doing work on default player mass on Planimeter Game Engine 2D, we would reference the average male weight to serve as the specification for player characters' mass so we would have some reasonable metric defined for physics calculations.

The team also did work on the Quake family of engines and so from time to time we would reference Source, and QuakeWorld.

It turned out that between the time that Valve's Source Engine had been written and the time that Planimeter Game Engine 2D was written, the average male weight had went up by a fair amount, because they too used an average male weight for the default player mass for their physics calculations as well.

SeanLuke2• 4 years ago

If I may be pedantic:

Compared to men, women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision. Yet despite these discrepancies, car companies are only required to test vehicle safety using crash dummies modeled after the average man.

Guinea pigs are 2000% more likely to die in a car crash and 10000% more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision. We don't make crash dummies for guinea pigs.

Since to objective is to reduce overall injury, the primary justification for a female crash dummy would be based not on the probabity of injury if you are a woman, but the probability of being a woman if you have received injury. This is of course also very high -- and it's great to see female crash dummies, long overdue. I'm just irritated at such sloppy writing.

LordDragonfang2• 4 years ago

Guinea pigs don't drive cars, women do.

SeanLuke2• 4 years ago

Did the paragraph say driver?

Even so, when a guinea pig is driving, it is 100000% more likely to die in a car crash! The point is, I think, that the reporter needs a lesson in Bayes Law.

scarmig• 4 years ago

It's a bit more complicated than that, not that the article you're responding to is particularly nuanced itself. The overall goal is to improve material and physical well-being for society in aggregate (itself a bit ambiguous, but bear with me). Suppose cars being optimized for the male case would minimize overall injuries. That will have the side effect, however, of dissuading women from driving at the margin, compared to a world where cars are optimized for some intermediate case. That's deadweight loss, and deadweight loss has a real economic and social cost. In the extreme, you could imagine a world where there's a net increase of one death in exchange for generating billions of dollars. In that non-realized world, that'd be an obvious trade off worth making.

Of course, with that different safety optimization target we'd then have loss when the marginal male driver chooses not to drive. Do they cancel out? At least if we're starting from a male-optimized point, small changes in safety policies are likely to lead to minimal loss of male drivers (by definition of optima; linear terms are zero in the vicinity of a local optimum). At that male-focused optimum, however, female drivers can potentially drive large social gains by small changes in safety policy in their favor (since the safety policy is not already optimized for them).

Which is all to say, what's socially ideal is likely somewhere between male-optimized and female-optimized, though not necessarily near the exact midpoint. And that's all assuming that car driving currently is currently male-optimized, which I'd question.

runnerup2• 4 years ago

This isn’t the first female crash test dummy at all. Dr. Mark Pearlman at University of Michigan invented a pregnant crash test dummy like 30 years ago. There are plenty of female crash test dummies.

Edit: according to congressional inquiry the NHTSA isn’t necessarily currently using “female” crash test dummies[0]. Still, they had been invented before.

0: https://norton.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/norton-...

taeric5• 4 years ago

This got me to do a quick search, which yields https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies. I'm curious how they pick which dummies to use, as they have 5th percentile for women there.

That said, it does seem to contradict the notion in the headline, at least.

Edit: I think being fair to the concept of the article, the claim is the dummies in my link are just scaled down versions of each other?

bckygldstn• 4 years ago

Here's the NHSTA report for a 2015 Ford Focus, the female model is used in the passenger seat [1]. In a quick look I couldn't find any tests with female drivers though.

The male [2] and female [3] dummies look to be in different proportions.

[1] https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v00000/v09000...

[2] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...

[3] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...

flaviut3• 4 years ago

The article specifically mentions the 5th percentile dummy you pointed out being inadequate:

The dummy that is sometimes used as a proxy for women is a scaled-down version of the male one, roughly the size of a 12-year-old girl.
At 149cm tall (4ft 8ins) and weighing 48kg (7st 5lb), it represents the smallest 5% of women by the standards of the mid-1970s.
However, a team of Swedish engineers has finally developed the first dummy, or to use the more technical term - seat evaluation tool - designed on the body of the average woman.
Their dummy is 162cm (5ft 3ins) tall and weighs 62kg (9st 7lbs), more representative of the female population.

the_lonely_road• 4 years ago

“The first” followed by anything seems to be such an unbelievable marketing gimmick at this point.

dang2• 4 years ago

Indeed. We almost routinely take it out now. Submitted title was "The First Female Crash Dummy Has Arrived". We've also changed the URL from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-c... to the original article it points to. Et tu, Smithsonian?

traceroute663• 4 years ago

“The first” followed by anything seems to be such an unbelievable marketing gimmick at this point.

Trust me, this isn't a marketing gimmick.

You could say its the "real" first.

See my comment lower down the page on Astrid Linder.

gw98• 4 years ago

Yeah there's a relatively ancient female crash test dummy in the Science Museum in London.

Photo I took. These folks have seen some shit in their time: https://imgur.com/TsEtUAx

sdiacom• 4 years ago

Well, if it has arrived, then clearly it isn't a great crash dummy.

(I know this forum doesn't take kindly to jokes, but at least now there's one that isn't sexist)

flumpcakes• 4 years ago

This is obviously a good thing - we should use crash dummies of all shapes and sizes, as people come in all shapes and sizes too.

I wonder though if the statistics about male vs female injuries are down to personal choice of car rather than testing methodology. It would be good to see a break down of the statistics based on car model etc.

For example, it is much more likely that a woman would own certain types of cars, at least in the EU. Some models are even referred to as "girly" in media. These typically are the more compact, city style cars like the Fiat 500. Likewise, it is much more likely for a man to be driving a larger white van, or any types of trades vehicle.

This hasn't got much to do with the article itself, I just often see statistics used with very tenuous causal relationships. This does matter if the goal is to reduce the % of women's injuries as we need to change marketing and society as a whole, rather than just using a more feminine crash dummy.

mberning• 4 years ago

It’s not practical. Crashing cars is expensive and you need consistent data. You cannot use a different dummy on each test and expect to make sense of the data. The best we could do is come up with an acceptable model and use that for all/most tests. If we could accurately model crashes in software then there would be no limitation on doing thousands of crashes with all different dummy types.

faebi• 4 years ago

I assume the numbers are even worse for very obese people and exceptionally tall people. Are obese dummies in use?

bhelkey• 4 years ago

The tallest NHTSA crash dummy currently in service is 5'9" and 171 pounds [1].

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies

necovek2• 4 years ago

Tall people (I am 195cm/6'5") generally require bigger cars to fit in (European D segment vehicles like BMW 3 series or Honda Accord are basically a small city car with barely usable rear seats when I am driving), and bigger cars have bigger mass. Hopefully electric cars with large cabins like IONIQ 5 are a start of fixing this :)

Which is only to point out that types of vehicles would be correlated for people on extremes, and certainly a type of vehicle matters for crash survivability on average.

dzink• 4 years ago

A lot of injuries are happening from bottom belts cutting into bellies, because people don't know how to position the belt properly or the belt doesn't position well for people who have bellies (many women over middle age, pregnant women, etc). It's not just average height and weight that matters. Soft tissue positioning matters a lot. Women tend to accumulate weight in hips (pear shape), while men usually do it in the belly, so elevated thigh diameter in women when seated pushes the bottom belt up onto the belly/soft tissue which then gets cut during an accident. Regulators need to surface and approve belt adjusters that make seat-belts safer for pregnant and overweight people.

xchip• 4 years ago

I think people that don't look exactly like crash test dummies are more likely to get injuries

dang2• 4 years ago

Url changed from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-c..., which points to this.

traceroute663• 4 years ago

I have had the pleasure of meeting Dr Astrid Linder on a couple of occasions in the semi-distant past. Thoroughly impressive woman and this field of work (occupant diversity in crash testing) is very much her core area of expertise.

Its been a while, but I believe the point here is that the American model is, as others have said, 30 years old.

There are lots of problems with these 30 year old American models. Crash testing is one. Xray dosage another. Nuclear exposure another. The list goes on. So much of the world still refers back to these ancient models and people, mostly Europeans like Astrid Linder are working hard to modernise these.

Astrid Linder's body of work that culminates in this present dummy takes into account real world data relating to size selection, anthropometry, modern knowledge of response corridors, more advanced assessment criteria, more suitable assessment thresholds, takes into account modern seat design.

If you want to read more detail, you can start by looking up her work on the ADSEAT project (2009–2013) which incorporated work on EvaRID. For example, recording of presentation from 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE51KAnukcg

A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers

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