{"id":9781,"date":"2019-08-09T09:04:17","date_gmt":"2019-08-08T23:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=9781"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:08:59","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:08:59","slug":"its-a-mans-world-in-the-crash-test-facility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/automotive-design\/its-a-mans-world-in-the-crash-test-facility\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s A Man\u2019s World In The Crash Test Facility"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Notice the design of the chest, biceps, neck and jaw…<\/p><\/div>\n

Take a look at your typical crash dummy \u2013 the sort they use in the ANCAP and similar tests (see the photo, sourced from ANCAP).\u00a0 Notice anything about them and what they\u2019ve got in common?\u00a0 Ten points (or should that be five stars?) for you if you noticed that a crash test dummy tends to look like a guy.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if you can really refer to a crash test dummy as a male but it (he?) is definitely masculine.<\/p>\n

Yes, indeed.\u00a0 Skipping the whole thing about gender identity and all that, there are only two basic human skeleton and tissue types: the male sort and the female sort.\u00a0 And, in case you haven\u2019t been paying attention, they aren\u2019t the same. Women (in general) have wider pelvises, narrower chins, a higher proportion of body fat, smaller hands and feet and thinner necks than men.\u00a0 They\u2019ve also got their centre of gravity in a different place.\u00a0 When guys get a bit chubbier, they put it on their tummies; when women do the same, it goes on the butt and thighs.\u00a0 Men have flat chests and even my A-cup sisters have boobs.\u00a0 Women are, on average, shorter (yes, we\u2019re talking typical and average here and I know perfectly well that there are tall women and short men).\u00a0 Male bones are denser and have a higher proportion of muscle mass.\u00a0 Women have a larger lumbar lordosis (the curve in the lower spine that lumbar support in the driver\u2019s seat is supposed to fit snugly into), which means that their pelvis tilts at a slightly different angle, which affects the walk. In fact, high heels are designed to increase that lumbar lordosis, the tilt and the swaying walk. And the list goes on.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, in spite of the key role of my heroine Bertha Benz in getting the whole horseless carriage thing started, car designers have used \u201cstandard\u201d or \u201ctypical\u201d human figures when designing cars.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as most car designers up until now have been guys, guess what they see as being \u201cstandard\u201d or \u201ctypical\u201d: the others sitting with them around the drawing board, who are all guys.<\/p>\n

Surely, I\u2019m not the only woman driver who has sat there fiddling with the lumbar support control and wondered why the heck it doesn\u2019t come out any further because it\u2019s not quite getting into the right place, and why the seat angle is never exactly right.\u00a0 We tend to start playing around with cushions at this point.\u00a0 As for the problems that crop up when you\u2019re a female driver in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, trying to negotiate a seat belt around the baby bump and the set of Pamela Andersons you\u2019ve picked up\u2026 don\u2019t even get me started!\u00a0 Apparently, women sit in the \u201cwrong\u201d driving position when they\u2019re behind the wheel.<\/p>\n

However, the safety systems that have been put in place by car designers have been developed and tested with the standard crash test dummy. Which is based on the average male.\u00a0 The smaller size, the different shape, the different centre of gravity, the different tissue density and all the rest of it means that a female body does not behave like a male body during a collision. \u00a0OK, they did try during the 1980s to introduce a feminine crash test dummy, but this (1) had the same proportions as the male ones but just scaled down rather than having curves and (2) is usually put in the passenger seat during crash tests.<\/p>\n

Can we just pause and think about that for a second? When they do crash tests, they mostly put the female dummy in the passenger seat.\u00a0 This was pointed out just last year by a pair of (female) Swedish road safety researchers*.\u00a0 Crash tests, in general, assume that women don\u2019t drive.\u00a0 These tests weren\u2019t being carried out in Saudi Arabia, for goodness sake!\u00a0 What were they thinking?<\/p>\n

A truth that\u2019s even more inconvenient than Al Gore\u2019s is that women have a much higher rate of being injured in a car crash than men.\u00a0 Given the same speed and impact type, women get hurt worse.\u00a0 The simple reason for this is because the cars\u2019 safety features have been engineered and tested with the average male body in mind.<\/p>\n

To take just one example, think of whiplash.\u00a0 A lot of new cars have active head restraints that are designed to cradle the head and neck to prevent whiplash.\u00a0 However, you can guess what these have been tested on most of the time.\u00a0 In fact, when the NHTSA started using \u201cfemale\u201d crash dummies (which they started doing in 2003), they used them for the side impact tests\u2026 which aren\u2019t quite such a problem for whiplash, given the vectors of the forces involved.\u00a0 Now, no woman is Barbie but we do have thinner necks than guys.\u00a0 In fact, if you\u2019re an artist or cartoonist, one of the quickest ways to make a head and shoulders to look masculine or feminine is to adjust the proportions of the neck.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s necks don\u2019t have the muscle and sinew there that guys do, so our heads and necks don\u2019t behave the same way during the sort of crash that is most likely to lead to whiplash.\u00a0 Add in the fact that women aren\u2019t \u201csitting right\u201d in the driver\u2019s seat because we\u2019ve got different pelvises, plus the fact that seatbelts are hard to get right if you\u2019ve got anything on your chest bigger than a B cup, which is the case for most women.\u00a0 Heck, we all know that fitted T-shirts and jeans for men and women are cut differently, for goodness sake!\u00a0 Given all these differences, and it\u2019s no wonder that women\u2019s rate of getting whiplash is much, much higher than that of guys.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to be charitable here and put forward the notion that the guys designing cars and doing the crash tests are nice guys at heart rather than a bunch of sexist pigs.\u00a0 Perhaps the idea of using a crash test dummy that looks more like a real woman jars with their inner knights in shining armour and a plan to put even a replica of a damsel fitted with lots of sensors so you can see just how much distress she gets into is upsetting. \u00a0If this is the case, well, that\u2019s sweet of you guys, but you\u2019re actually not doing us any favours.<\/p>\n

However, change is afoot and more and more women are getting into car design and the safety side of things, although anything like a 50\u201350 proportion in the workplace is a long way off.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet another (female) vehicle safety researcher from Sweden has looked at the stats and is developing a proper female crash test dummy with female proportions.\u00a0 Known as EvaRID, this dummy is designed with the whiplash issue in mind.\u00a0 You can hear Dr. Astrid Linder introduce this dummy in her TEDx talk (in English, don\u2019t panic!):
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