Should there be more female crash test dummies?
Tuesday, 30 April 2019
There's currently some motor-industry suggestion that current crash-testing dummies don't represent the female form accurately enough.
But the testing undertaken for Kiwis delivers enough gender equality to satisfy the woman who speaks on behalf of the programme in New Zealand.
A former motor industry high-flier who is now the NZ Automobile Association's general manager of motoring services, Stella Stocks is also the Kiwi voice for the Australasian New Car Assessment Programme (ANCAP), which dispenses crash test ratings for most new passenger vehicles sold here.
Involvement with the Melbourne-based ANCAP regime spanning more than two decades gives her insight into the programme, which is part-funded by the NZ Government, the NZAA and other parties.
**READ MORE:
* Crash test dummies get heavier as body weights rise
* ANCAP smashes new into old to demonstrate car safety gains**
That includes effort to ensure outcomes for females, not only as vehicle occupants but also as drivers, is accurately represented.
Findings are showing female seat-belted drivers in actual crashes stand a proportionally higher chance of injury than male-belted drivers in equivalent scenarios. That's causing reassessment of whether crash testing is providing erroneous information.
Is this simply because historically, most driver-dummies only reflect the measurements and biomechanics of the average male body?
Sentiment within the car industry itself is that this could be true. There's enough data now to suggest that, as a result, women have been more susceptible to injury and are killed more often in car crashes.
Volvo's project EVA, which we reported on recently, has become a leading resource and the Swedish brand is, unsurprisingly, now intent on using female dummies in the driver's seat more often in order to deliver more precise occupant safety information that could be life-saving in event of a real-world smash.
Following on, we sought to discover what level of dedication is applied in independent crash testing (which occurs after cars come into production), with focus on the aligned EuroNCAP/ANCAP tests most relevant to NZ.
Mrs Stocks is confident Kiwis are getting trustworthy scores from the tests.
She says ANCAP and NCAP use the same range of dummies – known as 'the family' because they present in male, female and child figures.
'The protocols for ANCAP testing designed to ensure protection is arranged for a range of occupants and sizes. For instance, in the latest ANCAP ratings… that includes a small adult female in both the driver and the passenger seats.'
It's not clear if ANCAP only used male dummies when it started, more than a quarter of a century ago, but in all her time with the organisation 'we've been a family.'
Testing has changed to keep up with improvements in car design, she acknowledges.
'What's happened more recently is that there has been more emphasis on the dummies. The tests have changed because the technology of vehicles has changed.'
ANCAP's injury-related data for males and females that has been collated from actual accidents has solely accrued from incidents in Australia, but she is confident it accurately reflects NZ scenarios.
'The fatalities and serious injuries are more male than female, with minor injury in Australia being a little bit the other way around 48-52 [per cent].
'It's very close.
'I think that what has happened over the years is that manufacturers have taken on board differences in [body] sizes.
'I think there has been a lot of progress made and that we get good information.'
In saying that, ANCAP doesn't go full 50-50 on using male and female dummies in the driver's seat.
'In the full-width frontal impact test one small adult female dummy is seated in the driver's seat,' she explains.
'The other small adult female dummy is seated in the rear outboard [second row, left-hand] seat.'
However, the female dummy isn't used in the frontal offset and side impact tests.
Acknowledgement about the exclusion of female forms from the design process and failure to test the safety of their cars on female bodies has been relatively recent. Using smaller crash test dummies to replicate proportions more representative of the female form only began in 2011.
Some suggest this is indicative of a widespread problem within male-dominated industries: when women are not present and their contributions and perspectives are not considered, fundamental issues go ignored.
Regardless of gender orientation, crash test dummies are much more than mannequins: these are expensive and intricate calibrated devices, designed not only to simulate human response to impacts, accelerations, deflections, forces and moments generated during high-impact crash testing but to do so repeatedly.
Different types of dummy are required to test the multiple areas of impact that would affect a passenger in a crash such as frontal or side impact.
GM's Hybrid III dummies have been the industry favourite for 20 years and are ANCAP's primary choice, but perhaps they're getting long in the tooth.
When Hybrid III was introduced the 'average' male it was designed to represent stood 1.8m and weighed 77kg. Since then, that average male has gained more than 11kg and is 2.5cm shorter.
Car makers are preferring dummies that are increasingly biofidelic – that is, they replicate key human physical characteristics including size and shape, mass and energy absorption – using more realistic body parts. Industry leader Humanetics, which supplies Volvo, has recently developed an obese dummy, weighing 123kg with a body mass index of 35.
Frontal Hybrid III's are now being replaced by a dummy named THOR, which stands for Test device for Human Occupant Restraint. With an improved spine and pelvic structure and many more sensors – 134 channels of data, versus 78 from Hybrid III – THOR has proven more accurate at determining how objects impact a human face during a crash.
How long before crash test dummies are retired in favour of the human computer model (HCM)?
Insofar as their role in car design goes, some believe dummies will be used mainly to validate and calibrate an occupant's interaction with the airbag and restraint system, with HCMs taking over to investigate more in-depth occupant percentile variations.
Stocks admits she is no fan of this in part because, she says – with no evidence of irony – that the dummies lend a more human element to the testing process.
The specific dummy configurations used by ANCAP are:
For frontal offset: Two 50th percentile male Hybrid III dummies, one six-year child dummy, one 10-year child dummy.
For a full width test: Two 5th percentile female dummies.
For side impact: One WorldSID male dummy, a one-year child dummy, one 10-year child dummy.
For the pole test: One WorldSID male dummy.