Finally someone came up with a decent female crash test dummy

• Women are more likely to be killed or injured in a crash, and one reason may be that we used crash test dummies based on the average male gender (as shown above).
• When crash test companies wanted to represent women, they sometimes used a smaller male dummy, but soon they may be able to use a new dummy with a better design, thanks to Swedish National Research Institute for Road Traffic and Transport.
• Accidents affect normal male and female bodies differently, given the difference in size and muscle.

You can learn a lot from a mannequin, especially if it better represents the average woman. For decades, crash test dummies were based on the average male body size, leaving the average woman less protected in a crash. We’ve known this since at least 2013, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a safety report that found women are more likely to be killed or injured in crashes and are especially “susceptible to neck and abdominal injuries.” The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) published a report with similar findings in 2019.

One of the researchers whose name was on all these documents is Astrid Linder, director of road safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (known as VTI). Linder recently spoke to the BBC about the work she and her team have done to develop a mannequin that closely mimics the normal female body. This is not the first female mannequin. For example, the IIHS has used female crash test dummies since 2003, and some crash test sites use scaled-down male crash test dummies that do not accurately represent women. Linder said VTI has developed more than just the best size at five feet three inches tall and 97 pounds; the way it moves better shows how women’s bodies move in a crash, given their different muscle strength.

Automotive safety engineers have also been working on solutions for the past decade. In 2012, researchers published a paper on neck injuries during crash tests using a “new prototype female manikin.” Work continued on mannequins that better represented women’s bodies. European researchers, for example, explored how better designed mannequins could help with whiplash injuries (2017) and quickly moved on to a broader discussion of how more representative “passenger models” would help more people in society (2019).

“We have differences in body shape and center of gravity, as well as hip and pelvic contours,” Linder told the BBC.

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Just because we now have a better way to test the effects of crashes on male and female bodies doesn’t mean car safety features will change tomorrow. No law anywhere requires the use of male and female dummies in crash tests, and engineers can’t fix problems they can’t identify. Some automakers already use gendered dummies in their crash tests, but Linder said she hopes their use will become much more widespread. At the end of the day, she said, all segments of the population deserve more safety in their vehicles.