In the global automotive safety landscape, there is an unexpected gender gap: women face a particularly higher threat of injuries in car injuries compared to men. The solution, some suggest, lies in deploying lock-check dummies to make certain cars safe for women. However, making cars safer for women is tricky, and not all checking with female models is the ultimate effective strategy for reducing the threat of injury to women.
In the middle of the debate is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) five-star defense rating program. The check provides consumers with data on casualty coverage and new vehicle defense. More stars mean a safer car and five stars is the highest rating.
The test does not currently require female crash test dummies in the driver’s seat for frontal crash tests. Instead, the evaluation uses a dummy modeled after the average male body in the 1970s in the driver’s seat and a smaller, female-like crash test dummy in the passenger seat.
Advocacy organizations, Secretary of Congress and Transportation Pete Buttigieg, have called for greater female representation in the protection check, saying it’s not safe or fair to assess only the effect on an accident on the average male driver. “When we only use mannequins in the shape of average men, we only know how their bodies respond to accidents,” wrote Susan Molinari and Beth Brooke, co-leaders of Verity Now, an organization that advocates for inclusion. of zero feminine verifications of pains.
The debate over whether to carry female models for crash testing has been presented as a debate about gender equity: NHTSA and safety researchers simply prioritize the safety of men compared to that of women. Others recommend that the security organization has passed and does not realize that women are now on rate and buy more cars than men. Experts actively involved in vehicle protection dispute this characterization, recommending that the challenge be more complex.
“It is complete garbage to suggest that anybody involved in this is not interested in improving protection for women because we all are. The question is, how do you do it? You have to first figure out what the problem is,” explains Matt Reed, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. He adds, “Just throwing a crash test dummy at the problem—there’s no evidence that that’s going to help you.”
While women face a higher risk of being injured in accidents compared to men, it is very important not to forget that cars pose a danger to everyone, and men experience more deaths in car accidents than women. In 2021, 14,498 men and 5,735 women lost their lives while in the driver’s seat of a car. “Men sometimes drive more miles than women and are more likely to engage in dangerous driving practices, in addition to not wearing seatbelts, driving under the influence and speeding,” according to a study report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
What happens when men and women are involved in the same turn of fate and the forces acting on the driver are similar? Before modern advances in automotive safety, women were at greater risk of dying than men. However, airbags, pretensioners and load limiters have significantly reduced the gender difference in terms of the threat of death in the event of a twist of fate. (Pretensioners are seat belt devices that tighten the belt to restrain the occupant and decrease the amount of forward throw in the event of a twist of fate. Once the pretensioners are activated, loading loads release the seat belt. so as not to exert too much force on the occupant’s chest.
For drivers surrounded by cars with air bags, pretensioners and load limiters, the threat of mortality is statistically the same as for men. In cars without all those bells and whistles, the threat of death is greater than for men .
In non-fatal accidents, women are more likely than men to sustain injuries. Osteoporosis plays a role, especially in thoracic injuries, but bone density does not completely eliminate the increased risk of injury in women. In addition to the chest, women also tend to suffer more injuries to the lower extremities, especially the ankles, during accidents.
Barney Loehnis, chief marketing officer at Humanetics, which produces crash test dummies, contends that female-like dummies play a crucial role in mitigating women’s increased injury risk. “Women are vulnerable to different types of injury because of their physiology, their bone structure, bone density, their muscle structure, back distribution, and pelvic structure. And when it comes to saving lives, to be honest, a man or woman will probably die in the same crash. There’s just no way of massively improving that. When it comes to injury reduction, every millimeter of accuracy counts,” Loehnis says. For example, he explains that a woman’s pelvis is shallower than a man’s. Since the seat belt anchors into the pelvis to keep the occupant in their seat, he believes it’s important to include a female-like pelvis in crash tests.
Other experts recommend that there are possibly other more advantageous measures to reduce the effects of injuries on women than a female accident model. The priority, they recommend, lies in perceiving the reasons that underlie the greatest vulnerability of women to express injuries. “The first step is to understand why women run a greater risk of suffering certain types of injuries. Once we can identify why women run greater threat (including what injuries the greatest threat and what turning scenarios of destiny lead to greater threat), we can identify the most productive way to follow, ”says Jason form. Professor at the University of Virginia who studies the safety of vehicles.
For example, Matt Reed’s team dives into the main points of the reasons why women suffer more ankle injuries than men. According to him, gender differences in bone strength are not a decisive factor in the increased risk for women and diversifications in footwear are also excluded. Although the length of the vehicle contributes to the twist of fate, it does not fully explain the propensity of women to suffer ankle fractures. Reed proposes that the way women apply the brake pedal may differ from that of men and may influence those injury statistics.
“Lately we are running on designing a test to download knowledge on the spot. Basically, we install cameras in the foot space, so we can monitor what is happening and find out if women use the pedals differently in a way That puts them at higher risk,” says Reed. He adds that crash control dummies are not necessarily useful in this scenario until they are shown to be in the vehicle in a way that, as it should, reflects real-world scenarios.
Reed also expressed concern that adding crash test dummies to the five-star crash test driver seat could have some unforeseen drawbacks. He argues that automobile companies will do whatever it takes to modify their safety systems to receive all five stars in the test. In doing so, he fears they could make changes that cause more safety problems than they solve.
Another way in which researchers promote security for other people throughout the bureaucracy and frame sizes is to use PC simulations, which reduces the dependence on physical collision tests. “Shock simulations with models of the human structure of the human structure They have the prospect of incorporating a wide diversity of points that influence the variability of the person in the threat of injury, adding the differences between women and men, and other people of the structure and bureaucracy of other ages. The computer simulations They will absolutely update physical collision tests, however, great intelligent progress has been made on how to use the two to evaluate safety in a broader diversity of scenarios than what can only be tried physically, “explains Formarray
The male dummy currently used in the driver’s seat in frontal crash tests for the five-star review was based on the average man in the 1970s at 5 foot 9 and 171 pounds. Since body types have changed in the last half-century, this “male” dummy, now more closely aligns with the weight of the average female. (Currently, the average women’s weight is 171 pounds and height is 5 foot 3.5, and men weigh in at 200 pounds and stand 5 foot 9, on average.).
The female crash test dummies being evaluated for use in the driver’s seat during frontal impact assessments include the Hybrid III 5th Female, which is already deployed in the passenger seat for five-star safety evaluations, and the more technologically advanced Thor-5F. Humanetics, the manufacturer of both models, boasts that the Thor-5F has a more precise anatomical design along with additional sensors for a more detailed analysis of potential injuries.
To complicate things more, the models considered do not constitute the average woman, but they constitute the smallest women. Hybrid III and Thor-5F female accident control mannequins are designed based on the stature of a woman who measures four feet and 11 inches high. and weighs 108 pounds, which is the five percent smaller of the female population of the United States . . experts agree that this very small female mannequin provides more valuable protection data than those that a mannequin can provide average.
In addition to Humanetics, others have been working to create new female-like dummies. Astrid Linder, a professor of of traffic safety at Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute has also spearheaded the development of a female crash test dummy for rear-impact crashes.
Regarding the integration of female models for shock verifications in security regulations in the United States, Thor-5F is recently verified in NHTSA. The Thor-5F load resolution or not to the list of appropriate postposts NHTSA Verification devices until September 2024.
According to a NHTSSA spokesman, “modern shock verification dummies are complicated tools, and their progression requires a collaborative and iterative procedure between the manufacturer and NHTSA. In September 2022, NHTSSA reached an agreement with humanics, the manufacturer Manikin, to deal with durability discovered in the new female mannequin. It increases its paintings to deal with the sustainability factor and gives humans multiple two months of multiple months. functionality specifications.
NHTSA also plans to include a “Final Notice of Decision” in 2024, which will come with a roadmap of planned adjustments to the five-star scoring test.
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