Female Crash Test Dummies Barely Weigh 100 Pounds
The odds of a female getting hurt in automobile accidents are 73 percent higher than that of a man. This statistic comes from a study conducted by students at the University of Virginia as reported by City Lab, which claims one of the reasons might be the crash test dummies used to represent them.
In 2003, "woman-type" crash test dummies were introduced. They stood five feet tall and weighed 110 pounds. Today, nothing about these dummies have changed. According to a report by Medical News Today, however, the average woman in the United States is five feet and three-and-a-half inches tall and weighs 170 pounds. Are you starting to see the problem?
Jason Forman was one of the scientists who worked on the study. About the results, he said the effort to do anything with the information available, "just simply has not been done yet." Sadly, the chances of anything changing in the near future are little to none.
Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, says it takes 20 to 30 years of research in the biomechanical field to fine-tune and build new crash test dummies. She added, "You never want people to get injured, but in order to gain enough info about the real world, we have to sit patiently and wait for real-world data to come in."
