10k women die in car crashes each year because of bad design

They're blowing up an issue.

"Industry data shows that part of the reason women are at greater risk than men is that we tend to drive smaller, lighter vehicles, while men gravitate toward bigger cars and trucks."

Ok. So that's simply choice, not negligence or bad design.

"For example, the neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men."

IE, men are physically stronger in some ways. If they make the vehicles safer to compensate, men will still have lower injury rates.

"With a president who himself knows the pain of losing female loved ones to a car crash, and our nation’s first female vice president, who herself is at greater risk every day she buckles into a car, if not now, when?"

Good lord. I've always thought Fast Company was a trash magazine, but geez.

To the extent they should test cars against male and female morphologies in order to ensure they aren't optimizing safety for one gender over the other, great. Chest seatbelts shouldn't garrote smaller women. That's reasonable. But the big problem is just different behavioral and innate physical differences, and that isn't going to respond to new legislation.

Oh, and just because I was curious, here are some stats:

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males....

Females are more likely to get injured then males in similar accidents. Still, nearly twice as many males are killed/injured in car crashes than females. Cars are dangerous any way you look at it.

>Unaccounted for are the varying bone densities, muscle structures, and abdominal and chest physiologies that differentiate women from a male dummy. For example, the neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men

It seems to me that there are two possible root causes (assuming the vehicle is constant, i.e. not from women driving smaller cars):

1. The crash test and vehicle designs are optimized around average male physiology 2. average female physiology would be more at-risk of injury and death regardless of crash test design/vehicle design

I'd like to know more about how much each of these factors contribute. The article does not make this clear.

Kudos to the authors for linking to the NHTSA source materials. The executive summary and the initial sections are way less click-baity than the article, and yet more interesting. Figure 6 and the table above seems to indicate that the fatality gap has significantly shrunk over time due to air bags and seatbealts. And the data on xvii seems to say that "Curtain+torso" airbags might almost eliminate the gap (but the error bars are huge).

It's obviously a serious problem, but the article doesn't really offer much in the way of solutions? The most obvious one by implication is that we need to incentivize manufacturing and buying smaller vehicles (which would presumably be safer for men too, if proportionally less so). Inside the car, it seems like it'd call for the redesign of seat belts and some kind of 'variable height' setting or detection for airbags.