Road safety: the average male as a norm in vehicle occupant crash safety assessment

ABSTRACT

This review addresses how women and men are represented in regulatory tests conducted to assess adult occupant safety in vehicles. Injury statistics show that protection in the event of a crash is lower for females than males. Still, vehicle crash safety assessment for adult occupants is only using the average sized male to represent the entire adult population, while the average sized female is not represented. In order to enable car manufacturers and road safety regulators to safeguard that females benefit equally from crash safety measures as males, it is necessary to develop new dedicated occupant models. These new models must represent the female part of the population, i.e. crash test dummies and human body models representing the average female. New female models would, together with their male equivalents, make it possible to identify the vehicle occupant safety systems which provide the best safety features for both females and males.

KEYWORDS:

• injury prevention
• male and female dummy models
• occupant protection
• vehicle safety assessment

Acknowledgements

Elisabet Agar has supported us by reviewing the language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 768960.

Notes on contributors

A. Linder

Adjunct Professor Astrid Linder has worked extensively within the research fields of traffic safety, models of the human in crash testing, injury prevention and crash-related countermeasures. During the last two decades, she has been widely published and made scientific presentations worldwide on topics within these research areas. She holds a PhD in Traffic Safety and an MSc in Engineering Physics from Chalmers University of Technology and is Adjunct Professor in Injury Prevention at Chalmers University. She is the Research Director of Traffic Safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI). From 2014 to 2017, the European Commission appointed Adj. Prof. Linder as an expert for the Transport Advisory Group and Advisory Group on Gender. She has won the EU Champions of Transport Research Road, EU Champions of Transport Research Overall Winner Transport, the US Government Safety Engineering Excellence Award and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations Håkan Frisinger Award.

M. Y. Svensson

Full Professor Mats Svensson has more than 30 years of experience in Injury Prevention and Impact Biomechanics. He finalized his PhD thesis on neck injury biomechanics, including experimental biomechanics, dummy development and seat design in 1993. In 2016, he was awarded the Håkan Frisinger Award for outstanding achievements in whiplash injury biomechanics. Prof. Svensson is head of the Traffic Safety Profile of the Chalmers Area of Advance Transport, and in this role, he has also been appointed Profile Director of Traffic Safety, at the SAFER Centre (https://www.saferresearch.com).