Hybrid-III 5F has no clothes and no hair — only a pair of plain black shoes that look like the type of clogs favored by line cooks and doctors. On her face is a half-smile and an expression of mild contentment. This model of aluminum and steel, and her smaller cousin, SID-IIs, are the crash-test dummies usually used to represent females in car-safety testing.
She and SID-IIs reflect the 5th percentile in height of women from more than 30 years ago, when they were developed. Only 5 percent of women will be shorter than this dummy. At a petite 4-foot-11 and 108 pounds, Hybrid-III 5F is a little lighter than an average 12-year-old girl today. SID-IIs has no arms and weighs 97 pounds.
Today, the average American woman is 5-foot-4 and weighs more than 170 pounds, according to the most recent data. Major safety rating systems used around the world don’t use an updated representation of an average female in their tests for car safety. In fact, they don’t even put a female dummy in the drivers’ seat for most crash tests in the US. This has major implications for the safety of women driving cars — and it’s likely many women don’t even know that the car they’re driving hasn’t been crash tested with a dummy that resembles them.
Better female models in crash tests are being called for, and some are on the way. But the process of making cars safer for female drivers is complicated.
Except for minor differences, most car requirements around the world call for similar test procedures — but none of them use a dummy that represents an average female. “We need a reality check,” says Astrid Linder, an engineer, researcher, director of traffic safety at Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, and a professor at Chalmers University. Linder has been a leader in the push for accurate female crash-test modeling worldwide for years. “And that reality consists of females and males — therefore we need representations of females and males in our tests.”
