According to the campaign group Verity Now, women are 73 percent more likely to be injured and 17 percent more likely to die in a vehicle crash than men. But vehicle manufacturers aren’t required to use female dummies in crash tests, so most don’t. And if they do, it’s infrequently and the dummies’ physical makeups only represent a very small percentile of the female population.
Swedish engineer Astrid Linder is on a mission to change that. Linder, research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, and her team have developed a prototype crash test dummy that realistically represents an average female body. They did this by compiling data from the University of Michigan’s humanshape.org, a database filled with different body types and shapes.
“We create the models in the computer, and we test them using virtual simulation software where we run hundreds of different simulation crashes” and then build physical models to test based on the simulations with the best results, Linder told CNN. “The prototype dummy is to show that we have the data to make an average female in the same way as we have, for a long time, made models of the average male.”
