The long, slow road to developing a female crash test dummy : NPR

When the Trump administration announced that we give the green light As for the design of the female crash test dummy, it comes as welcome news to advocates who have long fought for greater female representation in vehicle safety.

This mannequin has had a long journey. And she's not at the end of the road yet.

Vehicle safety tests in the US use crash test dummies based on the male body. Advocates say it's no coincidence that women are more likely to be injured in car crashes than men, even when taking into account the severity of the crash and the size of the vehicle.

Calls for a replica female crash test dummy have been around for decades. Consumer Reports has traced them back to 1980.

In the early 2000s, regulators added a small “female” dummy to testing, but it was just a smaller version of the male dummy with breasts attached. This does not reflect the actual anatomical differences between male and female bodies.

Around the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began thinking about creating a more accurate female dummy. For more than a decade, NHTSA worked with Humanetics, a leading manufacturer of crash test dummies, to develop, manufacture and test the dummy that the Trump administration unveiled this week.

The new dummy is called THOR-05F, or “Test Occupant Restraint Device, 5th Percentile Female.” (That is, a very small woman.) It is actually a woman's body.

“A woman's pelvis is more rounded and doesn't hold the seat belt as well,” says Chris O'Connor, CEO of manufacturing company Humanetics. He also pointed to anatomical differences in the neck and significant differences in the lower leg that correlate with much higher rates of leg injuries in women.

The dummy's design has previously been approved by some overseas regulators, and European officials have said they plan to include it in testing within a few years. But it has been stuck in limbo in the US, where for several years NHTSA has said more testing and review is needed before the dummy is officially accepted.

Adding a new dummy to the crash testing process will be expensive—excluding development costs, each individual dummy could cost more than $1 million.

The new design won't necessarily represent all women either; it has been criticized for being extremely small and not conforming to the average body size. Some security groups argued that using computer simulations that can simulate bodies of different sizes is a good way to diversify testing, although others say having better real crash test data as a source of power V these models are important.

So the path to this week's Department of Transportation announcement was a winding one. “This is a long overdue step toward full acceptance of this new dummy for use in our safety ratings and Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards,” wrote NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison.

And publishing technical documentation and specifications is really just one step. The final rule has yet to be published, and then the new dummy “will be reviewed” for inclusion in actual safety testing, the Department of Transportation wrote in its report. press release. These tests have not yet been rewritten to accommodate the new design.

In a statement emailed to NPR, NHTSA said the agency uses the female dummy in its own research and that the new release “provides the information the auto industry needs” to begin using it as well. But as for the federal new car rating program, which assigns safety ratings to new cars, the process of introducing the new dummy will begin in 2027-2028.

Women Drive Too, an advocacy group that has long advocated the use of female crash test dummies, greeted this week's news with muted expressions. “We applaud this action, but this alone will not be enough,” the coalition said. wrote in a statement. They are still pushing for Congress to pass a law that would require dummies to actually be used in real crash tests.

After decades of planning, the new dummies are still several years away from being used in actual federal safety testing.