Federal government to require car companies to use female crash test dummies

For the first time ever, American car companies will soon be required to test vehicle safety using dummies that are representative of women.

WASHINGTON — For the first time ever, American car companies will soon be required to test vehicle safety using dummies that are representative of women.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday unveiled an advanced female crash test dummy — the THOR-05F — that could help close the staggering gap of higher injury rates for women than for men in certain crash scenarios.

Maria Weston Kuhn, who launched the nonprofit Drive Action Fund to advocate for better car safety testing for women, experienced the statistical issue herself when she sustained life-altering injuries in a car crash several years ago. Recent studies have found are 73% likelier to be seriously injured in head-on car crashes compared with men in the same crashes. And female drivers and front-seat passengers are 17% likelier to be killed than their male counterparts in the same seats.

But it took about 4½ decades for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to approve the use of a dummy anatomically representative of the average female in terms of height, weight and body type even though advanced models — like the THOR-05F by Humanetics, a leading producer of crash test dummies — have been available for years.

“While I’m the first to acknowledge that this took far longer than anyone would like, it was very important to make sure that we got this right,” Jonathan Morrison, the highway safety agency's administrator, said at a vehicle safety research meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C. “We’re releasing design specifications for the first-ever advanced female crash test dummies.”