Ask Congress to Require Female Crash Test Dummies — Streetsblog USA

This is the sillythe best problem with the simplest solution.

Federal car crash tests do not use “female” dummies, which increases the risk of death by 17 percent and the risk of serious injury by 73 percent in car crashes for people assigned female at birth. Instead, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) uses smaller, male-based dummies and does not even put them in the driver’s seat, even though women make up the majority of American drivers.

Streetsblog recently spoke with Maria Weston Kuhn, 24, founder and president of Drive US Forward, about her organization’s efforts to build support for the bipartisan She DRIVES Act, which would require NHTSA to use mannequins modeled after women’s bodies. Drive US Forward recently launched an online tool to contact your senators to tell them to support the bill. Check it out here.

Kuhn is a keynote speaker at next month’s National Youth Transportation Equity Meeting, which will be held September 20-21 in Denver (register online via Eventbrite).

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Maria Weston Kuhn: I’m a car accident survivor. You don’t really know about these issues until they affect you, whether it’s your family or your friends. And that was certainly the case for me and my family. I didn’t know anything about transportation justice, mobility justice, or anything like that until December 26, 2019. My family and I were on Christmas vacation, driving down a winding, rainy country road, and we came around a corner and an oncoming car (that) had taken that same corner a little too sharply hit our family car head-on.

Luckily we all survived, but my mother and I were both seriously injured. I had to have surgery and stay in hospital.

When I got home from the hospital, I was of course on bed rest for a while. To keep me from getting bored, my Grandma Jo clipped out an article from Consumer Reports and emailed it to me. Because American cars are not safety-tested by female crash dummies, women are 17 percent more likely to be killed and 73 percent more likely to be seriously injured than men in the same accident.

I remember being very anxious at the time because the injuries described in the article, which are most common in women, were exactly the ones my mother and I had.

As soon as I read that article, I knew I wanted to do whatever I could to help. I started researching the topic, writing about it, meeting other survivors online, and doing everything I could to make sure nothing that happened to us happened to anyone else.

Streetsblog: I’m really glad you’re okay. Tell us a little bit about why crash test dummies have such a seismic effect on the outcomes of people who are assigned female at birth.

Kuhn: The Federal New Vehicle Assessment Program is the standard that automakers have to meet when they design their vehicles. It’s run by NHTSA. It basically involves running a series of crash simulations with dummies inside. They hit them against real cars, against real barriers, roll them over, and then take the dummies out and measure what their sensors read during those tests.

From there, they’re able to estimate what a person would have experienced, whether it was an injury, a death, etc., and from there determine the safety rating from one to five stars. That safety rating has to be displayed on new vehicles. If you ever drive into a new car lot, you might see the “Monroe label” on the window. That safety rating from one to five stars has to be displayed there.

That’s what the car companies are trying to get across. They don’t go any further. If there’s any kind of inequality or lack of representation in the new car evaluation program, the cars won’t be designed to address that inequality.

NHTSA uses these dummies without accurate representation of women. They use a shrunken male dummy that is 4’3″ and weighs 100 pounds to represent women. When I say shrunken male, I mean that the dummy has the internal morphology of a male body – it doesn’t have the bone mass, the bone structure, the musculature, the fat distribution, the organ distribution, anything like that, all of which have very serious consequences for how a body responds to force in a crash.

In terms of car safety, what this means is that because they have this shrunken male dummy representing women, the seat belts, airbags, etc. are not designed to protect us. They only use this miniature male dummy, called a Hybrid III-5th. They only use Hybrid III-5ths in the rear and passenger seats for the most deadly crash tests, even though women make up the majority of drivers in this country. The dummies are not representative. They are not being used properly.

The Hybrid III-5th has inadequate sensors. This means there aren’t enough sensors all over the body, especially in the areas most likely to be injured in a crash. The Hybrid III-5th would not have recorded the injuries I suffered, which is astounding, because what good is a crash test dummy if it can’t detect the injuries people suffer in a crash.

Streetsblog: How could the She DRIVES Act address this issue? Tell us about this particular bill and the timelines for change it provides.

Kuhn: The SHE DRIVES bill is a bipartisan bill currently before the Senate. It was introduced by Senators Fisher, Murray, Blackburn, and Duckworth and is currently before the Commerce Committee. The She DRIVES bill, officially the “Vehicle Safety and Equality Act,” is everything we could want in a bill. It requires NHTSA to adopt the most technologically advanced female crash test dummy in NCAP, and it mandates its use in the same way as the male dummy, including in the driver’s seat.

So that solves all the problems we just identified, right?

The bill does not specifically mention a dummy, which I think is very smart, because while there is currently an advanced crash system for women that is currently in the process of being approved by NHTSA, this more abstract language allows for the continued adoption of improved dummies as the technology improves.

The most advanced female mannequin currently available is called THOR-5F. It has been in production and development by NHTSA since 2003. It was approved as biofidel in November 2020, meaning it actually responds to force like a woman’s body would. Unlike the Hybrid III-Fifth, it is actually modeled after the bodies of people assigned female at birth.

Although NHTSA has been developing this dummy for more than 20 years, it has always been reluctant to commit to testing it as part of the New Vehicle Assessment Program, and especially to testing it in the driver’s seat. What the She DRIVES Act Would Do require that NHTSA incorporate the most technologically advanced female crash test dummy into its new vehicle evaluation program.

Streetsblog: Why do you think they haven’t done this already?

Kuhn: That’s a very good question. I’ve had the privilege of working directly with the Department of Transportation and NHTSA on several occasions in my career. I’ve been told that it’s basically a money issue. I’ve been told that it’s just a cost-saving issue: “How many tests do you want us to do?”

As a crash survivor, a young woman, and a young American, that’s a very difficult reason to rationalize and justify. I think that’s probably true for a lot of people who have been in crashes or who have lost loved ones in crashes. What good is crash safety testing if you don’t do enough of it?

I asked NHTSA for a number, but they haven’t been able to provide one yet. One of our partner organizations, VERITY NOW, has estimated that the cost of redesigning cars to make them safer for women would cost consumers less than $1 per car. The government already has eight of these more advanced female crash test dummies. While they are very expensive (they cost about $1 million each), eight dummies are enough to run tests for a long time. That’s all we need.

Car accidents in the United States cost billions and billions of dollars a year, especially those involving only women. Car accidents in which women are killed cost billions of dollars a year. I really have a hard time understanding why our public safety agencies are not willing to pay that price.

Streetsblog: Why is it important that young people like you are at the forefront of this movement?

Kuhn: I get asked this question a lot: “Why Gen Z?” Because it doesn’t seem like a particularly youth-centric issue at first glance. But if you look at it more closely, motor vehicle crashes are the second leading cause of death for young people in the United States—until recently, the leading cause of death. Globally, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for young people. It’s our bodies that are at risk.

I’ve found that people in our age group are less likely to accept living in institutions that don’t prioritize our safety. I started Drive US Forward as a Gen Z organization because I wanted the people most impacted by this issue to have the loudest voices. Young people have historically been left out of the conversation about transportation justice, and I believe the people who are most impacted by this should be among those who can make a difference.

The National Youth Transportation Equity Meeting will be held September 20-21 in Denver. Register online here.