Crash Test Dummies: The Human-Like Surrogates of Automotive Safety Research

Strategic Insights -

In Australia's Holden proving ground, a family of biofidelic crash test dummies, developed at enormous cost by General Motors, plays a crucial role in simulating real-world crashes to improve vehicle safety standards. The dummies, named Sid, his wife, a six-year-old, and a six-month-old baby, called CRAB1, are valued at $50,000 each and have undergone significant upgrades to better replicate human impact response biofidelity. The latest addition to the family, Biosid, features a new deformable face designed to reproduce head injuries, addressing a major limitation of its predecessors.

Key Takeaways:

  • The International Standards Organisation (ISO) study concluded that neither Sid nor Eurosid had sufficient impact response biofidelity, prompting GM to develop Biosid with a deformable face comprising a plastic foam element under a plastic skin.
  • The dummies match the weight and mass of humans, including specific body parts, and have features such as lifelike legs, hard rubber neck and vertebrae, spring steel ribs, and plastic muscles and tissue.
  • The dummies can imitate most human movements, including those of limbs, spine, chest, neck, and head, and can be "tuned" to simulate deteriorated bone conditions in the aged or to accommodate different sex, weight, size, and age profiles.
  • The dummies are equipped with instruments that record forces involved in crashes, which happen in just one-tenth of a second, and special cameras capture the incident from all sides at speeds of up to 1000 frames per second.
  • GM is planning a joint study with the University of Michigan to develop a foetal insert, called the "dummy tummy," to simulate a seven-month-term unborn child and study the effects of vehicle crash trauma on the uterus.

Statistics:

  • Asia-Pacific car manufacturers are being urged to adopt the stringently-enforced quasi-European safety standards (Source: [1])
  • America's front-seat-belt wearing rate often does not rise above 25 per cent compared with a claimed 92-93 per cent in Australia.
  • There are 38 states in the US where front-seat-belt wearing is mandatory, but compliance is often low.
  • The cost of a pre-production prototype car built at a cost of perhaps $500,000.
  • Up to five hours to set up a dummy with delicate sensors.
  • 100,000 Lux is the level of lighting used for crash test simulations.

Sources:

  • [The Age] (no date provided)
  • [CRASH dummies] (no date provided)
  • General Motors
  • International Standards Organisation (ISO)
  • University of Michigan