When the Trump administration announced it was giving the green light to the design for a female crash test dummy, it was welcome news to the advocates who have long fought for better female representation in vehicle safety.
This dummy has been on a long journey. And she's not at the end of the road yet.
Vehicle safety tests in the U.S. use crash test dummies based on a male body. Advocates say it's no coincidence that women are more likely to suffer injuries in car crashes than men, even if you control for the severity of the crash and the size of the vehicle.
Calls for an accurate female crash test dummy date back decades. Consumer Reports has traced them back to 1980.
In the early 2000s, regulators added a small "female" dummy to tests — but it was just a scaled-down version of the male dummy, with breasts attached. That doesn't reflect the real anatomical differences between male and female bodies.
Around the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started thinking about creating a more accurate female dummy. For more than a decade, NHTSA has worked with Humanetics, the leading manufacturer of crash test dummies, to develop, build and test the dummy that the Trump administration unveiled this week.
The new dummy is called the THOR-05F, or Test device for Human Occupant Restraint, 5th-percentile Female. (That is to say, a very small woman.) It's actually based on the female body.
"The pelvis for a female is more rounded and does not hold the seatbelt the same way," says Chris O'Connor, the CEO of manufacturing company Humanetics. He also pointed to anatomical differences in the neck, and significant differences in the lower leg that are correlated with much higher rates of leg injuries in women.
The dummy's design had previously been embraced by some regulators overseas, with European officials indicating plans to add it to tests within a few years. But it had been stuck in limbo in the U.S., where for several years NHTSA said that more testing and consideration was required before formally adopting the dummy.
Adding a new dummy to the crash testing process will be costly — aside from the costs of development, individual dummies can each cost more than $1 million.
The new design also won't necessarily represent all women; it has been criticized for being extremely small, rather than reflecting an average body size. Some safety groups have argued that using computer simulations, which can model bodies of various sizes, is a good way to diversify testing, although others say that having better real-life crash test data to feed into those models is essential.
So the road to this week's announcement from the Department of Transportation has been winding. "This is a long overdue step toward the full adoption of this new dummy for use in our safety ratings and Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards," wrote NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison.
And the publication of technical documents and specifications is, indeed, just one step. A final rule still has to be published, and then the new dummy "will be considered" for inclusion in actual safety tests, the Department of Transportation writes in its press release. Those tests have not yet been rewritten to include the new design.
Women Drive Too, an advocacy group that has long pushed for the use of female crash test dummies, welcomed the news in measured tones. "We applaud this action, but by itself, it won't be enough," the coalition wrote in a statement. They're still pushing for Congress to pass a law that requires the dummies actually get used in real-life crash tests.
After decades of planning, the use of the new dummies in actual federal testing is almost certainly still years away.
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