Women face more injury risks in car crashes. So why are test dummies modeled after men? (WTOP News)

Maria Weston Kuhn had one lingering question about the car crash that forced her to have emergency surgery during a vacation in Ireland: Why did she and her mother sustain serious injuries while her father and brother, who sat in the front, emerge unscathed?

“It was a head-on crash and they were closest to the point of contact,” said Kuhn, now 25, who missed a semester of college to recover from the 2019 collision that caused her seatbelt to slide off her hips and rupture her intestines by pinning them against her spine. “That was an early clue that something else was going on.”

When Kuhn returned home to Maine, she found an article her grandma had clipped from Consumer Reports and left on her bed. Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a frontal crash, she learned, yet the dummy used in vehicle tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) dates back to the 1970s and is still modeled almost entirely off the body of a man.

A survivor becomes an activist

Kuhn, who is starting law school at New York University this fall, took action and founded the nonprofit Drive US Forward. Its aim was to raise public awareness and eventually encourage members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would require NHTSA to incorporate a more advanced female dummy into its testing.

The agency has the final word on whether cars get pulled from the market, and the kind of dummy used in its safety tests could impact which ones receive coveted five-star ratings.

“It seems like we have an easy solution here where we can have crash test dummies that reflect an average woman as well as a man,” Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican who has introduced the legislation the past two sessions, told The Associated Press.

Senators from both parties have signed onto Fischer’s “She Drives Act,” and the transportation secretaries from the past two presidential administrations have expressed support for updating the rules.

But for various reasons, the push for new safety requirements has been moving at a sluggish pace. That’s particularly true in the U.S., where much of the research is happening and where around 40,000 people are killed each year in car crashes.

Evolution of a crash test dummy

The crash test dummy currently used in NHTSA five-star testing is called the Hybrid III, which was developed in 1978 and modeled after a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man (the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than today’s average). What’s known as the female dummy is essentially a much smaller version of the male model with a rubber jacket to represent breasts. It’s routinely tested in the passenger seat or the back seat but seldom in the driver’s seat, even though the majority of licensed drivers are women.

“What they didn’t do is design a crash test dummy that has all the sensors in the areas where a woman would be injured differently than a man,” said Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Humanetics Group, which has spent more than a decade developing and refining one.

A female dummy from Humanetics equipped with all of the available sensors costs around $1 million, about twice the cost of the Hybrid used now.

But, O’Connor says, the more expensive dummy far more accurately reflects the anatomical differences between the sexes — including in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs, which one NHTSA study found account for about 80% more injuries by women in a car crash compared to men.

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