A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers
bbc.com
bbc.com
Edit: according to congressional inquiry the NHTSA isn’t necessarily currently using “female” crash test dummies[0]. Still, they had been invented before.
0: https://norton.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/norton-...
That said, it does seem to contradict the notion in the headline, at least.
Edit: I think being fair to the concept of the article, the claim is the dummies in my link are just scaled down versions of each other?
The male [2] and female [3] dummies look to be in different proportions.
[1]: https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v00000/v09000...
[2] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...
[3] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...
> The dummy that is sometimes used as a proxy for women is a scaled-down version of the male one, roughly the size of a 12-year-old girl.
> At 149cm tall (4ft 8ins) and weighing 48kg (7st 5lb), it represents the smallest 5% of women by the standards of the mid-1970s.
> However, a team of Swedish engineers has finally developed the first dummy, or to use the more technical term - seat evaluation tool - designed on the body of the average woman.
> Their dummy is 162cm (5ft 3ins) tall and weighs 62kg (9st 7lbs), more representative of the female population.
Cards on the table, I see no reason not to explore this; such that if my post feels like I'm arguing against it, that is a mistake in tone.
I do question if it was truly never explored in the past, or if there are previous results that just show diminished returns on extra variety? I'll note that nobody is calling for better racial makeup on the evaluation tool. I would expect that there are height/weight differences spread across groups other than just the sexes. I'm also inclined to believe that we are far more alike than you would expect when it comes to how we are in a crash.
It does though! It talks about how women are shorter & lighter (which the scaled model addresses) as well as how their muscles and general body shape are different from men:
> Females are shorter and lighter than males, on average, and they have different muscle strengths
> "We have differences in the shape of the torso and the centre of gravity and the outline of our hips and pelvis," she explained.
Anyway, I'm certainly not an expert on this stuff. I imagine that extra testing is super expensive, especially if each test ends up destroying a car. I think it'd be great to have more tests for different groups. But starting to test for 50% of the human population is a massive low-hanging fruit here.
Not OP, but I think you’ve done a pretty good job laying out your nuanced question / request for additional information. I have the same question, but didn’t feel motivated enough to craft a comment myself, so I’m here validating yours. Cheers
Again, I'm not an expert here. But my first guess is that the most boring explanation applies: someone wanted to make a female dummy. women are lighter then men right? so let's use our existing design but make it smaller. And at that point, we might as well make it the smallest reasonable thing, so that we get as much range as possible to interpolate & extrapolate with.
No idea if I'm right or on the right track, but I can easily see this conversation happening.
Trust me, this isn't a marketing gimmick.
You could say its the "real" first.
See my comment lower down the page on Astrid Linder.
> trust me
But I went and found your other comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33511009
It is not at all obvious to me how this is the first of its kinda instead of an improvement on previous “female” crash dummies. I know this conversation has strayed into pure semantics, but the idea that an improvement to an existing thing is actually the “‘real’ first” seems like an obvious dubious claim. To be blunt: it seems like clickbait, or at least an attempt to overinflate.
Reality is that as Astrid Linder's body work proves. The 30 year old model is, essentially, incorrect.
Believe what you like, but as I said, this really is the first "real" one that truly reflects the female body and takes into account all modern knowledge about both crashes and the female anatomy.
Stay stuck in the past if you like. But I for one recognise the value of the work of Astrid Linter in keeping women safe.
Photo I took. These folks have seen some shit in their time: https://imgur.com/TsEtUAx
Do they reflect average american body though, male or female.
> Their dummy is 5-foot-3 and weighs about 137 pounds, per the publication.
"The average American woman weighs 170.6 pounds and stands at 63.7 inches (almost 5 feet, 4 inches) tall. And the average waist circumference? It's 38.6 inches." Per google.
Looks like the male dummy actually reflects average American woman in weight at 171.
https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
That female dummy would have been in the 24th weight percentile, while the male in the 57th female weight percentile.
This "female" test dummy won't actually be representative of most drivers, just as the "male" test dummy isn't. Neither for men nor for women. I'm sure the people who interpret the test results understand this already of course.
This is one of the reasons why women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash. The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.
This is one of those discrimination situations where the truth is actually the exact opposite of what is reported. The dummies tested are 4'11 95 pounds and 5'9" 171 pounds. If the extremes pass then it's likely everyone in between is fine. The people who aren't covered are those above 5'9" or 171 pounds which skews heavily male.
But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.
They push the belt to the side.
You're right of course, but I think the deeper issue is that crash dummies and tests are designed just for the "average" and that many people fall outside of this "average". As a 2 metre tall bloke I've sat in many cars where the head rest just doesn't raise high enough for example, which always struck me as a fairly serious but also easily fixable shortcoming.
So the thing is that the issue of female crash dummies is a special case of the wider "crash tests should represent a wide range of people". Of course women of various shapes and sizes should be included in that, but also men of various shapes and sizes. By focusing so strongly on only specific groups (women in this case), I think sometimes these larger issues get kind of lost, even though the specific focus isn't really a bad thing in itself. e.g. stuff like "well, we included women now, which is what you wanted, so job done!" ... well, no...
You can suggest testing a wider distribution of crash dummy types without also inventing a scenario in which this article somehow prevents that from happening.
One problem is that tackling easy causes of male deaths is met with complains about making men softer or feminizing them.
For example you mention incarceration and studies show a "sentencing gap" where if a man and woman commit exactly the same crime, the man will on average receive a longer sentence. But there is no call to reduce incarceration for men specifically. There are some calls to reduce incarceration for everyone. There are also bizarrely some calls to reduce it for women specifically in the name of "gender equity" (even though the "sentencing gap" already privileges women).
Basically it's politically incorrect to specifically help men unless you wrap it up in language about how it actually helps the people who matter, i.e. women and children.
The world is complex, and when dealing with groups of people even more so.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
Presumably the difference here is around weight distribution and other limb length and size proportions. Still I think "First Female Crash Dummy" is a stretch.
I don't think that's right, at least not as stated? Many more men die in car crashes than women: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Men tend to be in crashes that are more severe than women, though, probably because men are more likely to speed and drive drunk. If you try to look at crashes of equal severity (which is always a bit fraught since you don't have a real control group) then you do see something like what you're describing, though the NHTSA thinks this is mostly due to how robust men vs women are on average and not car design: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811766.PDF
P(death_or_injury | crash AND female) > P(death_or_injury | crash AND male)
Sounds like the "probably" here is a guess?
CDC also states that men get into fatal accidents much more often (2x) than females [2].
[1]: https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/rates-by-age-and-ge... [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendr...
You're rehashing the above conditional probability discussion.
"The number of driver fatal crash involvements per 100 million miles driven in 2016-17 was 63 percent higher for males (2.1 per 100 million miles traveled) than for females (1.3 per 100 million miles traveled). Rates were substantially higher for males than for females ages 16-29, but were only slightly higher for ages 30 and older. The sex difference was largest among drivers ages 20-29."
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males...
Conditional on being in a crash is the operative clause here.
> Crashes involving male drivers often are more severe than those involving female drivers
is closer to the mark, and the next unquoted sentence "However, females are more likely than males to be killed or injured in crashes of equal severity, although sex differences in fatality risk diminish with age" seems like it may be what the article was talking about, though the cited source is from 1998, well before a number of modern car safety features were standard (even air bags weren't required until that year).
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males...
Men are involved in many, many more crashes overall, but in a car crash, cars are currently designed to protect men better than women.
The indefinite article is doing a lot of work there.
I doubt those instances are conscious financial decisions. Suicide methods are highly correlated to the methods people have at their disposal... and cars are for many, the most dangerous item they have.
So masking a suicide can double payments to the family. AD&D also does not pay out in deaths involving toxic substances or “reckless driving”.
Can you cite an academic reference for this? I'm suspicious, but genuinely curious.
Edit: linked article changed, was referring to: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-c...
Aging increases a person’s fragility (likelihood of injury given a physical insult) and frailty (chance of dying from a specific injury). Young adult females are more fragile than males of the same age, but later in life women are less frail than their male contemporaries.
My impression is that this thread suggests the design of cars has a bias to male safety at the expense of female safety. This link doesn't support that conclusion.
I asked for this book for my birthday and read it. However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?
She wrote a solid 3-4 pages on large phones and it was just surreal to read. Paraphrased:
> Phones are very large. This is bad for women; they have smaller hands. Nobody knows why tech companies make large phones. It is very silly, because women actually use their phones more than men. I asked multiple tech journalists for an explanation, they had no idea either. Here I present some theories that can tie this issue to sexism: companies simply design phones with men in mind, companies expect women to carry a handbag all the time so a large phone is no bother, and so on. And sure, women could buy an iPhone SE but that model hasn't been updated in two years.
Nothing about better battery life, nothing about better media consumption. It was so confusing, as every tech journalist, literally every tech journalist, knows that bigger phones have better battery life.
Sadly it made it a bit difficult for me to fully trust the rest of the book.
Based on the title alone, I couldn’t take that book seriously.
Corporations: sell things women actually buy.
Journalist: why are these corporations so sexist against women? This makes me angry!
To get the battery life, I'd rather have a thicker phone without increasing the screen size.
But Korean women actually lead the push for bigger phones, since they could keep larger devices like the Samsung Note in their purses and using more than one hand turned out to not be a big deal to most people if it meant being able to see more content/detail on the screen and better battery life.
The words "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" popped in my brain. Luckily it didn't affect you
Which makes me wonder about the extent to which I can trust popular takes in things outside my wheelhouse.
― Michael Crichton
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Pretty suspicious as the answer is obvious: phones are large because people want large phones. The reason that the iPhone SE is never updated is because nobody buys them, women included. Small phone fans are just a tiny vocal minority.
To add, when the Android ecosystem pioneered larger phones, there was intense pressure on Apple to follow. Because, again, people want large phones.
That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.
Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38".
I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.
1. lower control forces
2. shorter legs
3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash)
With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem.
Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.
> In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb.
> For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb.
I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese.
[1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.
Specifically, the media rarely shows fat people. Not the truly fat ones, with the exception of the freakshow genre of TV specifically about extremely fat people. In recent years they've started to show more and more fat people, but not nearly fat enough to give you an accurate impression of average Americans. Just fat enough to give token representation of fatness.
Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. The people on those shows are freaks because they have freakishly little shame and agree to be on TV.
Not really. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV are pretty rare even in America; if they were at all common then there wouldn't be much of a market for such shows in the US ("you're just gonna show me ordinary people like me? yawn.") You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, and they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are fit by European standards.
Have you been to Ohio? That ratio is flipped. "Plump" is merely overweight but not obese. In states like Ohio, plump seems athletic because the massively obese are very common. You can easily see several 500lb people a day, fat enough for any TV freakshow.
Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas.
> several 500lb people a day
Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them.
Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese.
Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
This is my point. If you can see several 500lb people a day going about your everyday errands around town, then the people on the 500lb TV freakshow are not freaks for being 500lbs, they're freaks for agreeing to be on the TV show. And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
If you judged America just by the TV shows, you'd think that 500lb people are very uncommon. But in reality you can see them every single day without even trying.
Compared to how many people you see total going about your everyday errands? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? That is my point: you're deliberately ignoring the overwhelmingly vast majority of the people you encounter in favor of a very tiny minority solely for the sake of asserting that tiny minority to be far more common than they actually are.
> And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
Exactly. Shows have to go way out of their way to find 500lb people, because they are exceedingly rare. If they were anywhere near as common as you assert, then they would be far more prevalent on American TV.
In attempting to refute my point you've accidentally proven it, twice in the same comment. I rest my case.
DC-proper and Arlington VA usually rank highly on most fitness rankings. I'm a bit west of there, but generally a pretty fit area, I guess.
Traveling around to various cities, you see this variation city-to-city, too. Some cities are just fitter (and, in some cases, way "hotter" all around—like you gotta re-calibrate your "10" scale, to use a crude but illustrative example, or you won't see anyone under a back-home "8" your whole visit) than my home city. Others are even fatter (largely in the deep South). Though in all cases you have to take into account that you may only be seeing their equivalent of the "hot" part of town and that may be skewing your overall impression.
Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
Do you have any better model to recommend?
You could probably get closer to an accurate model by identifying the fixed weight of an adult's skin/bones/organs. Going from critically emaciated to fit would mostly entail adding muscle, which is denser than fat.
From there, the proportion of added muscle v. added fat when increasing waist circumference would be the deciding factor in accurately estimating weight; that proportion is highly dependent on the individual and one's level of daily activity.
At my current 150lbs and 5'7", I have a <30" waist. When I was 180lbs (got fat in college) it was near 38". That 30lb difference took me from athletic to obese. Granted, I'm male, but I'd think that on a 5'4" women, that 38" waist was visibly even larger.
Centers For Disease Control:
> "The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%)."
Certainly not an athletic build, and a borderline-obese BMI, but well short of ball chair territory.
While the kind of Americans whose careers put them in front of cameras are rarely so mighty, from what I've seen of the real American population those photos look about average.
Like, if you're literally incapable of recognizing the difference between those photographs and, say, the folks on My 500 Pound Life or whatever "Learning" Channel drivel you watch, then maybe you ain't the one to be lecturing anyone about "constantly moving the goalposts".
Sorry that we don't all live in towns entirely populated by bulemic supermodels. It's frankly an indictment of you and numerous other commenters that y'all would look at these photos v. the fat people televised for entertainment and decide "yes, these are entirely indistinguishable and therefore warrant the exact same terminology and scorn".
Get a grip.
Then why would you police my language and demand I use the exact same terminology for a very wide range of body sizes/masses?
> There's levels from fat to hambeast to "their movement influences tides".
And there's likewise levels from thin to fit to bulky to curvy to plump to fat.
> That doesn't make the first category acceptable.
And who, pray tell, are you to decide what is or is not "acceptable"?
I never said anything about the language you should use. I said "that is really fat though". This is all pure projection on your end.
> it's frankly an indictment of the US that people try to sweettalk this sort of behaviour with words like 'curvier' and 'plumper'
Your words, not mine.
Of course, it wouldn't be good for your dating life if you described ~50% of women as 'obese' so it's good you've got more sensitive language.
It shouldn't be hard to spec and built crash test dummies with simulated fat.
Some possible downsides would be overwhelming the airbags capacity, and larger overall volume of space which needs to be protected from intrusion/crushing/etc. I Wonder how much this has been studied, hard rubber and steel dummies probably don't reflect conditions at the extremes very well...
That is in part also why it is so important to have a properly tightened seat belt and why we have explosives to tighten it up further when a collision is detected.
It makes sense to at least measure the differences and hopefully we can find ways to improve overall safety.
However I am automatically wondering a gender disparity in outcomes is a simple issue about genetics? Average women are far less muscular and are less robust than men, it makes sense given the same forces they'd be more damaged than men. Thats going to be something you cannot fix (if you distribute the forces more evenly then both genders will still have disparate outcomes due to structural differences)
One thing that these kinds of articles never seem to address is what is an acceptable rate? To illustrate the point with arbitrary numbers is a 1% improvement worth $10B ? IDK, but that's more of the kind of effort I'd like to see from writers.
Just look around you. How often do you see families where the man is driving the big fancy SUV and the woman is driving the smaller "second" car?
Maybe it's a regional thing, but around here the big SUV replaced the minivan as a "women's car". I hear safety (i.e. wanting to "win" in a crash, often phrased exactly like that) as a common reason for the choice.
Their husband will drive a similarly-huge truck, usually.
The husband in the UK will more likely drive a fast, sexy coupe/hatchback/saloon with a large engine, rather than a truck.
That's just my observations. The data might say otherwise.
Genuinely, in what way? When I am taking kids somewhere, I want car that fits into small parking space. I just dont see what SUV would help with.
Most people don't have an array of vehicles to choose from except when buying, so they don't really get much of a choice between "the car" and "the SUV".
When you have small children a minivan becomes really nice, since the doors open wide which helps with car seats and booster buckling.
Also you want a car that can fit 7 or 8 kids because you take turns with other parents ferrying many kids around, not just your own.
And nobody cares about parking space size out in the US 'burbs. Parallel parking's almost non-existent, garages uncommon outside the city proper, and spaces are huge and plentiful (arguably too plentiful, even allowing for car-centric living—a high percentage of it sees almost no use at all in a given year)
The size lets you leave all the kids' activity shit in the car all the time, so you/they don't forget it at home.
With all these studies it's very important to correct for various differences and interpret the data. I suspect Volvo, for example, has a pretty good idea on these things (because they wouldn't compare all vehicle but particular models, etc).
Was the more to it? If they are aware of this fact, it feels like it would be trivial to control for it, to determine whether women are still more vulnerable in the same types of vehicles.
The NHTSA uses estimates for "Statistical Value of Life and Injuries" and "Value of Travel Time": https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/economic-values-u...
For 2021 they value a life at $11.8M: https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
Very roughly, if your 1% improvement cost $10B/y, the NHTSA would consider it worth it if it averted at least 847 (10B/11.8M) annual deaths.
As for: "gender disparity in outcomes is a simple issue about genetics?"
There's an easy way to find out!
It might be possible to a small adjustment could help bring the disparity down without necessarily increasing the danger to men. I think it's worth looking in to (not to imply that you were saying it isn't).
It's hard to interpret these statistics. I suspect there are significant behavioural differences, such as riding at different times of day and at different speeds, which account for some of the differences.
* KSI goes up far less than expected as the journey length goes up (less than linearly, and maybe even down slightly between some categories). That's because the longer journeys are made by much more experienced cyclists - by definition, a very unfit cyclist never cycles 25miles, for example.
* But the category of very shortest journeys makes up by far the largest proportion of journeys, so a straight unweighted averages of KSI across journey length categories would give a very unrepresentative view.
* Those women that do cycle tend to be in the lower journey length categories because on average, women are less physically fit.
In other words, women would tend to be in the relatively more dangerous category of shorter journey length. It's not more dangerous because it's shorter - it's more dangerous because you had to be less fit to be in it in the first place.
Again, note that the above is all made up. But it shows how you could get to the contrdictory-sounding stats of the parent comment.
And i would bet that normal characteristics of testosterone would explain a sizable portion of the difference.
When I was doing work on default player mass on Planimeter Game Engine 2D, we would reference the average male weight to serve as the specification for player characters' mass so we would have some reasonable metric defined for physics calculations.
The team also did work on the Quake family of engines and so from time to time we would reference Source, and QuakeWorld.
It turned out that between the time that Valve's Source Engine had been written and the time that Planimeter Game Engine 2D was written, the average male weight had went up by a fair amount, because they too used an average male weight for the default player mass for their physics calculations as well.
If women really did want smaller phones, then the iPhone Mini would have sold far more than it did. But phone size is a tradeoff, and smaller phones are a niche product due to their worse specs. It's as simple as that. No industry-wide sexism is involved.
Its been a while, but I believe the point here is that the American model is, as others have said, 30 years old.
There are lots of problems with these 30 year old American models. Crash testing is one. Xray dosage another. Nuclear exposure another. The list goes on. So much of the world still refers back to these ancient models and people, mostly Europeans like Astrid Linder are working hard to modernise these.
Astrid Linder's body of work that culminates in this present dummy takes into account real world data relating to size selection, anthropometry, modern knowledge of response corridors, more advanced assessment criteria, more suitable assessment thresholds, takes into account modern seat design.
If you want to read more detail, you can start by looking up her work on the ADSEAT project (2009–2013) which incorporated work on EvaRID. For example, recording of presentation from 7 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE51KAnukcg
I wonder though if the statistics about male vs female injuries are down to personal choice of car rather than testing methodology. It would be good to see a break down of the statistics based on car model etc.
For example, it is much more likely that a woman would own certain types of cars, at least in the EU. Some models are even referred to as "girly" in media. These typically are the more compact, city style cars like the Fiat 500. Likewise, it is much more likely for a man to be driving a larger white van, or any types of trades vehicle.
This hasn't got much to do with the article itself, I just often see statistics used with very tenuous causal relationships. This does matter if the goal is to reduce the % of women's injuries as we need to change marketing and society as a whole, rather than just using a more feminine crash dummy.
I'd like to see the test methodology changed to correct this. Car manufacturers should be required to simulate what would happen in say 10,000 crash cases - with a wide variety of angles, loads, speeds, passenger types, offsets, etc. The car manufacturer should then present all those results to the NHTSA, who will then pick a few at random to test on a real car to validate the simulations.
The safety rating would be some average of performance of all the 10,000 simulated test cases, with a scaling penalty applied if the simulations didn't accurately reflect reality.
This is literally the case: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40824939/iihs-side-impact... (and an earlier one that was added and IIRC only Volvo did well, because Volvo was testing it before it was required: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a18737558/iihs-adds-new-fr... )
I agree that digital simulation should become an important part - including aftermath simulation from actual wrecks.
In fact, I'll argue that from a moral point of view it's more important to ensure the safety of people who choose to not operate a vehicle vs. those that did. Both are important of course, but this would be correct priorities. In reality the priorities are of course rather different.
I would be surprised if other test agencies like the US one did not do the same.
Cyclists are definitely harder because they are similarly unprotected human bodies travelling at higher speeds and with more chances of different collisions (i.e. it's very rare for a pedestrian to hit a car on the side, whereas I am guessing that's more likely for a cyclist).
In general, I would give equal priority to testing for everyone, iow, prioritise by the numbers getting injured/killed.
Btw, cyclists also make a choice of operating a vehicle (motorcyclists are similarly vulnerable because the characters of their vehicles are similar).
And how will you compare the results ? (apples with pears, SUV 40km/h 2 tonnes with small car 20km/h at 37 degree 1 ton )
> women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash
> and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries
for children?
Car seat sizes should not be relevant as all children should have some form of riser/child seat to be properly protected (and never front facing on the front seat).
They also have a 5th-percentile adult female dummy, which is closer in height and weight to the 10-year-old dummy than to the 50th-percentile-male dummy.
Which is only to point out that types of vehicles would be correlated for people on extremes, and certainly a type of vehicle matters for crash survivability on average.
(I know this forum doesn't take kindly to jokes, but at least now there's one that isn't sexist)
"We will run 10 clinical trials testing the efficacy of this drug in men and 5 clinical trials testing its efficacy in women"
and "We will run 10 clinical trials testing the efficacy of this drug in men and suggest women take a lower dose"
> Compared to men, women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision. Yet despite these discrepancies, car companies are only required to test vehicle safety using crash dummies modeled after the average man.
Guinea pigs are 2000% more likely to die in a car crash and 10000% more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision. We don't make crash dummies for guinea pigs.
Since to objective is to reduce overall injury, the primary justification for a female crash dummy would be based not on the probabity of injury if you are a woman, but the probability of being a woman if you have received injury. This is of course also very high -- and it's great to see female crash dummies, long overdue. I'm just irritated at such sloppy writing.
Even so, when a guinea pig is driving, it is 100000% more likely to die in a car crash! The point is, I think, that the reporter needs a lesson in Bayes Law.
The title of the article that we are currently discussing.
Please don't pretend your comment doesn't exist in the context of the discussion it's a reply to, that's somewhere between dishonest motte-and-bailey and blatantly bad comment etiquette.
(And beyond that, you're not even using a proper application of Bayes Law anyway, since "probability of injury if you are a woman" is what you should be concerned with if you're building safety devices)
Of course, with that different safety optimization target we'd then have loss when the marginal male driver chooses not to drive. Do they cancel out? At least if we're starting from a male-optimized point, small changes in safety policies are likely to lead to minimal loss of male drivers (by definition of optima; linear terms are zero in the vicinity of a local optimum). At that male-focused optimum, however, female drivers can potentially drive large social gains by small changes in safety policy in their favor (since the safety policy is not already optimized for them).
Which is all to say, what's socially ideal is likely somewhere between male-optimized and female-optimized, though not necessarily near the exact midpoint. And that's all assuming that car driving currently is currently male-optimized, which I'd question.