There was one thing Maria Weston Kuhn didn’t understand about the car accident that required emergency surgery while she was on vacation in Ireland: why did she and her mother get hurt badly while her father and brother, who were sitting in the front, were unharmed?
Kuhn, now 25, missed a semester of college to recover from the 2019 crash that she says caused her seat belt to slide off her hips and pin her intestines against her spine, rupturing them. “It was a head-on crash and they were closest to the point of contact,” she said. “That was an early clue that something else was going on.”
When Kuhn got back to her house in Maine, she found a Consumer Reports article that her grandmother had cut out and left on her bed. She found out that women are 73% more likely to be hurt in a frontal crash than men. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s test dummy for cars is still mostly based on the body of a man and was made in the 1970s.
A survivor turns into a leader
Kuhn did something about it and started the non-profit Drive US Forward. He is going to law school at New York University this fall. The goal was to make people more aware of the problem and eventually get Congressmembers to sign a bill that would require NHTSA to test with a more advanced female dummy.
It is up to the agency to decide if cars should be taken off the market, and the type of dummy used in its safety tests could affect which cars get the coveted five-star ratings.
The Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, who has introduced the bill twice before, told The Associated Press, “It seems like we have an easy solution here: we can have crash test dummies that look like an average woman and a man.”
Both Democratic and Republican senators have signed on to Fischer’s “She Drives Act,” and the transportation secretaries from the last two presidential administrations have said they want the rules to be updated.
But the push for new safety rules has been moving slowly for a number of reasons. That’s especially true in the U.S., where a lot of research is being done and where about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents.
The history of crash test dummies
The NHTSA five-star crash test dummy used now is called the Hybrid III. It was created in 1978 and is based on a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man, which was the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than the average today. A “female dummy” is basically a male model that is much smaller and has breasts added to it with a rubber jacket. It is usually tested in the back seat or the passenger seat, but not often in the driver’s seat, even though most licensed drivers are women.
“What they didn’t do is make a crash test dummy with all the sensors in the places where a woman would be hurt differently than a man,” said Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Humanetics Group in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The company has been working on making one for more than ten years.
An all-sensors female dummy from Humanetics costs about $1 million, which is about twice as much as the Hybrid that is being used now.
O’Connor, on the other hand, says that the more expensive dummy much better shows how men and women’s bodies are different, especially in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs. One NHTSA study found that these differences cause about 80% more injuries to women than to men in car accidents.
According to O’Connor, these kinds of real dummies will always be needed for testing the safety of vehicles and making sure that virtual tests are accurate.
Soon after Kuhn’s 2019 crash in Ireland, Europe started using the THOR 50M (based on a 50th percentile man), a more advanced male dummy made by Humanetics’ engineers, in its testing. A number of other countries, such as China and Japan, have also adopted it.
Some American automakers are skeptical about this model and the THOR 5F (based on a 5th percentile woman) that the company uses as a comparison for women. They say that the more advanced devices may overstate the risk of injury and make safety features like seat belts and airbags less useful.
There is a discussion about whether more sensors make things safer.
Because of an accident near her home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in 2022 that killed her driving friend, Bridget Walchesky, then 19 years old, had to be flown to a hospital and had eight surgeries over the course of a month. While Walchesky agreed that the seat belt probably saved her life, she said that some of her injuries, like her broken collarbone, were caused by it being too tight around her. She thinks that this could be fixed with more safety tests that focus on women.
Waldesky said, “Seat belts aren’t really made for the bodies of women.” “Some of my injuries, the way the force hit me, they were probably worsened.”
A trade group for the auto industry called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation told the AP that instead of making a new Hybrid dummy mandatory, it would be better to make improvements to the current one in order to ensure safety, which it called its top priority.
“This can happen on a faster timeline and lead to quicker safety improvements than requiring NHTSA to adopt unproven crash test dummy technology,” it said.
The vehicle safety agency gave Humanetics’ THOR dummies good grades in their early tests. Comparing the results with bodies from real accidents, the NHTSA found that they were better at predicting almost all injuries, including those to the head, neck, shoulders, abdomen, and legs.
Differently, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by auto insurers, was much less impressed with the dummy’s ability to predict chest injuries in a frontal crash. According to the insurance institute’s tests, the male THOR dummy wasn’t as accurate as the current Hybrid dummies, even though the number of sensors had grown a lot.
Senior vice president for vehicle research at IIHS Jessica Jermakian said, “More isn’t always better.” “You also have to be confident that the data is telling you the right things about how a real person would fare in that crash.”
How slowly the rules are being changed
According to NHTSA’s budget plan, they will make a female version of the THOR 5F with the end goal of testing it. But it might take a while because the U.S. hasn’t approved the male version of the THOR yet, even though other countries have already adopted it.
In a 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office, which does research for Congress, said that the NHTSA had “missed milestones” in the development of improvements to crash simulators, including improvements to the THOR models.
Some people, including Kuhn, are annoyed by how long it takes to change the rules. She says she can see why automakers don’t want to do it if they’re afraid of having to make big changes to their designs to make them safer for women.
“Fortunately, they have very skilled engineers and they’ll figure it out,” she told me.
