> but the currently available test dummies don’t reflect the average female body
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.
Depends on how far down you want to go with all the people sizes in all the various combinations of positions. I imagine the cost-benefit is based on the marginal change of information you get by changing the dummy size/shape, and based on their revealed behavior, they don't think more sizes add more information.
When I worked at Toyota, they used "number of Highlanders" equivalence when shaming people for not picking up their large format paper schematic prints.
But how about a tall and light person and short and heavy person? The permutations are endless. Not arguing against testing, I think it's great to get more test dummies in the seat, but I don't know where/how one should draw the line.
If you're testing those two dimensions, there are four corner cases. It may be that for some reason somewhere in the middle is a worse case, but the extremes should certainly be tested.
Asking about avg isn’t a great idea, you really want the modal, which might be near the avg but may not be. This was an issue that came up when they tried to design the optimal fighter cockpit in WWII, they designed a cockpit that fit no one well.
If there's no average male pilot, there's certainly no average driver, male or female. If tests with dummies are to be useful, they have to be interpreted as abstract results, not assumed to correspond 1:1 with what any individual human body would do.
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.
A woman is not just 'a smaller male'. Male dummies do not take into account female's different weight distribution, muscle mass etc.
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.
Dummies don't take muscles or weight distribution into account. They're metal skeletons with rubber bodies over them.
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.
The dummy in video seems to be way closer to woman then just size. For example, it has breasts. Those matter for seat belt position. So yeah, it seems that dummy is more then just smaller.
But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.
The dummy's breasts don't seem to move in the video despite the impacts, I think they're probably made out of steel, or a very stiff rubber. I doubt they accurately simulate real breasts, I think they're on the dummy to convey femaleness.
> But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.
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...
> 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
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.
It's funny that on average women already live 5 years longer than men, but every "gender equity" initiative seems more interested in increasing that gap than decreasing it.
There are actually people working on various causes of that - attempts to lower incarceration rates, initiatives for safety practices in work help men more then women. Initiatives against smoking and alcoholism make male lifespan larger. Less guns in society would actually lead to less men dead.
One problem is that tackling easy causes of male deaths is met with complains about making men softer or feminizing them.
You're kind of reinforcing my point that while there are things that incidentally help men, none of that is done in the name of "gender equity".
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.
There is one class of human being who are really at the bottom, and it's not women (or even poor women) but poor men. They die early, are more victims of violence, commit suicide more often, die at work an order of magnitude over women, have greater chance to be homeless, greater chance to have disabilities, have less partners etc etc.
But let's be frank no one care about them, even in Europe.
These kind of things aren't binary; some groups, on average, have it better in one area, and worse in another. But I don't think that should really come in to play when we're talking about one specific area (car crashing, in this case).
The world is complex, and when dealing with groups of people even more so.
As someone 4 inches taller and uh... let's go with significantly heavier than 171 pounds I feel like I'm losing. I certainly wonder what would happen in a crash when I'm riding with my knees jammed against the dashboard. And weight is obviously important and it's rather concerning that I'm stressing the safety system past what it was tested against.
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.
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
More men than women die conditional on being in a crash, because men tend to be involved in more severe crashes. But in crashes "of similar severity" women tend to be more severely injured than men. One confounding variable is the size of the vehicle, but it may be factored into the "similar severity" calculation.
Men also drive more. Taxi drivers, truck drives, cops, all those professions are male dominated. And at least where I live, it is man drive family car to work and woman is more likely to go by public transport to work. Man is more likely to be the one to drive when family goes somewhere (and some are quite territorial about it).
Natural language is always ambiguous, but it is very reasonable to interpret "women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash" as
P(death_or_injury | crash AND female) > P(death_or_injury | crash AND male)
That is, women are more likely to die or be seriously injured CONDITIONAL ON being in a crash. So it is irrelevant that more men than women are injured in total.
Conditional on being in a crash men are probably still more likely to be killed or injured, because the crashes men are in tend to be more severe (often due to their driving decisions).
Young + Male is a great way to increase your car insurance [1]. I think it's safe to say car insurance's cost is reflective of risk (cost) with a more serious accident costing more than a less serious.
CDC also states that men get into fatal accidents much more often (2x) than females [2].
"Crashes involving male drivers often are more severe than those involving female drivers."
"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."
"per 100 million miles" is also restarting this conversation from scratch.
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).
Sure, there's still the question of survivability between men and women if those accidents are categorized based on severity with measuring things like speeds involved, whether it was a T-bone, type of road (highway, city street, etc.) and probably lots of other dimensions I'm leaving out.
Conditional on being in a crash, men are more likely to die due to being involved in more severe crashes. But ceteris paribus, women tend to be more easily injured.
Literally the first sentence in the article says, "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."
The article does say that, but the article is simplifying. If you click through they're citing https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... which says 17% "given similar physical insults". But conditional on being in a crash is not the same thing as conditional on being in a crash of a given severity.
I remember hearing somewhere that a number of the men involved in "speed and drunk" crashes are going through financial issues, life insurance doesn't pay out if you commit suicide but it does if you crash into a bridge at 100mph.
Life insurance does typically pay out in case of suicide after a 1-2 year cliff. It's a health issue like any other.
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.
Life insurance often does but sometimes has a 2 year waiting period before it does. AD&D is a separate policy on top of life insurance, often worth an equal amount, which does not pay out in cases of suicide.
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”.
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.
> The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.
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.
That's also just sort of blatantly incorrect. The early growth in phablet sales that eventually lead to them becoming the normal size for phones was disproportionally in _women_.
Anecdata but I, a man, prefer small phones that easily fits in my pocket and I can easily use with one hand. But otherwise most women I know have very large phones and when I've asked them, they prefer them. I think one component may be purses, but another is how likely one is to treat their phone as their primary computer.
Same. I have moderately large hands (XL motorcycle gloves), and I prefer the iPhone Mini form factor for the exact same reason. Sadly, it looks like it's gone to the graveyard. I haven't seen a flagship Android phone in a similar size recently either.
To get the battery life, I'd rather have a thicker phone without increasing the screen size.
A bigger phone may have a better battery life, but that does not mean that better battery life is why phones are large. iPhones have gotten bigger while battery size has shrunk. There is literally a void inside of the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple obviously make a very deliberate choice about the size of their phones, and so unless you have a plausible suggestion for the why of their sizing choices, your opposition to the idea that it's based on the average man's hand size doesn't hold up.
Apple cut the production of the iPhone SE because of low demand. If it would be true that women would like to use small phones but cannot buy any, this is very hard to explain.
The new SE (2nd and 3rd gen) have the form factor of the iPhone 8 and no longer the small form factor of the iPhone 5. They’re bigger than the iPhone 13 mini.
From what I remember from phone history, the original iPhone was the size it was due to extensive research to ensure a Japanese woman's hand could reach all parts of the screen and there was a planned big push into Japan, which mostly succeeded at the time.
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.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Idk. Her point that now that phones are maxed out to being comfortable for men and have stopped growing really nails it. They even having folding ones now, because forcing men to have a phone laughably large for their hands just isn't an option, whereas it is for women.
With a book title like that it's unsurprising that this is her theory. So an entire round of "tech journalists" produces no answer, at all.
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.
Absolute weight is more important in a crash test scenario. If your proportions are correct, but the weight is far off, that’s going to be much worse than having incorrect proportions with the correct weight.
I don't how they chose the dummy size and weight but they seem to do crash dummies based on median bodies, not "average" bodies, and the researchers who made the female dummy were Swedish so presumably wouldn't care about American sizes.
The average women's clothing size is now 16 or 18 (up from 12 or 14 in 2010). It corresponds to about a 38" waist. Average height is around 5'4", which has been mostly consistent over the last 20 years.
That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.
I wonder how useful averages are since you can be (almost) arbitrarily fat, but die very quickly when you're even a little underweight. I guess the minimum waist size for an adult female is still double-digit inches, but I wouldn't dare guess the maximum waist size.
Note that a 10" shorter waist is only about 1.5" on a side (diameter of 9 inches vs 12) which is noticeable but not as much as "10 inches" would make you think.
I was at Boeing when the cockpits were redesigned to accommodate women:
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.
Admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this or attempting to guess the weight of strangers, but this gender breakdown seems a bit odd to me— in my circles and community exposure (west of Toronto), I would have imagined that most guys fell into a 180-220 bucket, and most women into a 120-150 one.
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.
You can't get an idea of what Americans are really like by watching the media. You have to come here, travel around and see for yourself.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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,
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.
> This is my point. If you can see several 500lb people a day going about your everyday errands around town
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.
I'm offended as a native Ohioan. This is just not true, Ohio's obesity rate is the same as everywhere else. The spread between states is tiny. California is a whole 2% less obese. What about Ohio do you think magically makes people fatter?
Even within my middling-fat red-state city, you can see very different size distributions traveling to different parts of the city. Downtown? Skews young and relatively fit. Most 'burbs, and out in our more-diffuse second business district? Average weight of an adult is a solid 50lb higher than downtown, and probably more like 75lb. Poor areas? Everyone seems to be either ruler-thin or very fat, young and old alike, in about equal measure. That one rich people enclave town with its own country club? A glorious place to drive through when the stay-at-home spouses are out for their jogs, let me tell you. You see the same sort of pattern visiting e.g. a coffee shop in that area, so it's not just selection bias of the activity of jogging.
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.
A 38" waist would make someone about a foot or two wide (12.1 inches assuming a perfectly circular waist, but most folks' waists are wider than they're "long") - which is curvy, sure, but not severely so. Average waist size for European women is around 30", for reference - so only a couple inches less wide.
Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
A "simple quadratic model" is about as appropriate for extrapolating human weight from human dimensions as a microwave is appropriate for cooking steak.
Not really; indeed, my point is that body metrics are surprisingly difficult to model given the wide variances.
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.
From the bodybuilding literature I’ve seen weight and body part circumference changes are a little more linear than what you’re suggesting. Though there may be some people who you can model as spheres.
Spheres would be cubic, we're just talking about cylinders here. And the difference between the 30" and 38" waist will be mostly by better approximating a cylinder at the waistline, the underlying skeletal structure isn't changing much.
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.
Average fitness levels vary a lot with region, if you stick to a few trendy coastal cities you might get the impression that most Americans are fairly fit. But if you travel across America a few times, I think you'll find that ball-shaped is actually quite common.
It's one of those bi-modal distributions, I imagine.
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%)."
While it's not an athletic build, the grandparent poster thought it was so high as to call the accuracy of the data into question.
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.
Maybe if your only exposure to other humans is Hollywood actresses, but in the US those photographed people look pretty normal, and in the rest of the world those people would be somewhat curvier/plumper than average but not unreasonably so.
Fatter. Why use euphemisms to avoid using the term "fat" when it's literally the case. It shouldn't be considered a loaded term, Americans need to admit they're fat instead of constantly moving the goalposts
I'm sorry for not using your arbitrarily-preferred synonym for "plump".
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".
No. Over here I'd call this borderline obese. These people are unhealthily fat and it's frankly an indictment of the US that people try to sweettalk this sort of behaviour with words like 'curvier' and 'plumper'.
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".
Dude. I never said that they were indistuinguishable. There's levels from fat to hambeast to "their movement influences tides". That doesn't make the first category acceptable.
To be fair, 170 lbs 5'4" in terms of BMI is right at the top of 'overweight' and only 5 lbs (or 1 inch) short of 'obese' [1] (although it is well short of 'severely obese')
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.
Stats on car accident injury rate vs BMI would be interesting but I'd imagine something like "the fatter the safer" (up to some level) would be the conclusion and so testing on skinnier model is harsher and will result in better safety.
The heavier a person is, the more kinetic energy they have. Moreover, seatbelts don't really stop a person until flesh is sufficiently compressed against bone. From that, I'd reason that skinny people should have a higher survival rate. Intuition be damned, data is important.
It shouldn't be hard to spec and built crash test dummies with simulated fat.
Just 'spitballing', but if the restraints are adequate, the compression of flesh may act to slow down and spread out the force of the accident to a certain degree. Bruising may be more likely, and the increased overall force might break ribs and such, but increased weight may have some benefits at some speeds/in some scenarios.
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 exactly what the crumple zone in the car is for though. You only have X meters of margin before you need to be at full stop. Assuming (dangerous to assume, yes) it does its job perfectly the most important factor becomes to react, that is to start the slow down as quickly as possible so you can utilize the crumple zone to max effect. I feel like flesh compression will mostly delay the impact rather than properly slowing you down (fast enough), which would be a bad thing.
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.
Fit people also recover faster, which probably gives them a better survival rate over all. Fit people are probably less likely to linger with persistent injuries before perishing. Consider particularly the difficulty diabetics have with infection.
Right but we're not talking about energy of the homogenous object. The brain or heart or lungs of fat person won't be that much heavier, but the fat around it might work as cushion to spread the spike of deceleration over longer period (less G's over longer period of time basically). Then again, the fat on the other (back) side of the person might compress squishy stuff inside more so I dunno how well that can be simulated in a dummy
Your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, but it is still pretty limiting to try and cover the entire statistical distribution of human bodies with just two crash test dummies.
If you were shocked that this is only happening now, I'd highly recommend reading or listening to the book "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez. She highlights instances of this across many industries. I think that it's particularly relevant to software engineers, or anybody else who has a chance of unintentionally introducing bias into a system.
I disagree. If you get to a part of the book where you have some knowledge of the industry she's criticizing, it's clear how mistaken is. For example, her bit about phone sizes was glaringly bad. She thinks that every phone manufacturer is sexist and builds large phones which don't work as well with women's smaller hands. While the hand size thing is obviously true, women prefer larger phones because larger phones have better battery life, better hardware specs, and better cameras. And since most women carry purses, their phone choice isn't constrained by pocket sizes.
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.
As another comment put it, it is assumed that women are the same as "smaller men". So it is more like they are not thought of rather than "cheaply valued".
I think in many aspects of life, sure, but here it could simply be something akin to how the US air force realized that the idea of "average" seating in jet planes was dangerous and completely divorced from reality, driving their push for individually customizable seating. I think it's still ubiquitous that we measure things that aren't clearly generalizable across a wider population, but we think they are.
If we look at ~100 years of history with cars, I think it's fairly safe to say that no one's lives are especially valued. Leaded gasoline was introduced even though the dangers were already well understood, it had to take a massive public outcry campaign to get car manufacturers to do anything about driver safety ("Unsafe at any speed" and such), pedestrian and cyclist safety is still under-prioritized in designs, etc.
> 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.
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.
IIRC a similar study was done in Europe. The conclusion was that women are indeed more likely to die or sustain serious injuries, but that the cause of that was that woman, on average, drive smaller cars. So, they are more vulnerable in a collision.
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?
> 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.
I have heard exactly the same sentiment from women here in the UK. Not a single one of the women I have spoken to about this realise they are participating in an arms race.
The husband in the UK will more likely drive a fast, sexy coupe/hatchback/saloon with a large engine, rather than a truck.
In my experience in America, women prefer huge SUVs while men prefer more sporty cars, or trucks. Huge SUVs are slightly feminine because they're good for getting the kids to soccer practice. SUVs ate the market for vans, another vehicle good for moving a bunch of kids around.
That's just my observations. The data might say otherwise.
In most parts of the US, sports practice areas tend to have ample parking. Optimizing for "fits into small parking space" is largely a benefit only in cities.
SUVs come in all sizes now, and there's some advantage to certain sizes.
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.
Unless you're in a downtown urban center, soccer practice has plenty of parking space for your ship-sized SUV (for that matter, so do downtown parking garages. It only becomes an issue with street parking.)
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.
Good at keeping the occupants alive in a collision with another giant car. Crash stats from tests are largely for like-on-like—good luck with your Ford Focus' decent safety rating when you're t-boned by an F-250 :-/
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.
In many cases the woman drives the "mom van" (minivan or SUV) to shuttle kids around, and the man drives "the car" (usually a sedan of some sort) to work and back each day.
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).
> IIRC a similar study was done in Europe. The conclusion was that women are indeed more likely to die or sustain serious injuries, but that the cause of that was that woman, on average, drive smaller cars. So, they are more vulnerable in a collision.
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.
I suspect you're right. Efforts to make cars safer for women will succeed, but at the same time they'll also make cars even safer for men. The 'average' man is able to survive more physical trauma than the average woman, because the average man has denser bones, muscles, etc. Consider that 4x as many women than men have osteoporosis. Disparities like that will lay a heavy finger on crash data.
I dunno that there's necessarily an acceptable rate so much as everyone's just aiming to get the rate to "lower than it is now" while keeping costs acceptable and reasonable.
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).
There are interesting stats from TfL in London. Women make approximately 25% of bicycle trips in London, but account for about 40% of the fatalities. Yet when you compare KSI (killed or seriously injured) by gender, men are more likely to be KSI for a given distance travelled.
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.
Sounds like a classic case of Simpson's paradox [1]. Here's how it could work, but I've made everything up so might not be true at all - it's just an example of how those numbers could exist:
* 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.
Women have less bone density and less muscle mass than men. In an equivalent physical trauma situation they are more likely to be hurt than men, as both the physical reaction in the face of danger is less agile/powerful and the body is more fragile. Both of these apply even moreso when controlling a bicycle, because of the more direct control nuances and the greater force disparity (exposure to cars and obstacles around you).
There is an average child test for 6 and 10 year dummies at NCAP AFAIK.
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).
According to [1] there are crash test dummies used to represent newborn, 12-month, 3-year-old, 6-year-old and 10-year-old children.
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.
I am worried that cars are designed to pass a few really specific tests well, for example 'head on at 40 mph', 'side impact at 30 mph', but then perform much worse in a 'typical' crash, for example '37 degrees, offset by 6 inches, at 38 mph'.
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.
> I am worried that cars are designed to pass a few really specific tests well, for example 'head on at 40 mph', 'side impact at 30 mph', but then perform much worse in a 'typical' crash, for example '37 degrees, offset by 6 inches, at 38 mph
I wish companies had to test new cars in collisions against the smallest, most vulnerable vehicles on the road. Cars exist in a shared environment; if Ford creates a new, taller, heavier F-250, it shouldn't be allowed on the road unless there's a reasonable chance that it won't brutally crush anyone driving, say, a 2005 Honda Civic sedan around in the event of a collision.
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.
Agreed. The larger and larger vehicles of today are so much more dangerous for pedestrians, but they make me wonder: has any country ever prioritized pedestrian safety in car design? Feels like the sort of thing that manufacturers ought to do, but I'm not aware of it ever happening. Maybe there are regulators I don't know about who oversee this?
European tests specifically test for pedestrian collisions: this is why we've got softer, crumpling bonnets and bumpers in newer cars, for instance.
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).
> 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
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 )
Specifications are important, but it's funny how you arrive at them and what defining them over time reveals even if it's obvious on its face.
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.
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> 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)
It's a bit more complicated than that, not that the article you're responding to is particularly nuanced itself. The overall goal is to improve material and physical well-being for society in aggregate (itself a bit ambiguous, but bear with me). Suppose cars being optimized for the male case would minimize overall injuries. That will have the side effect, however, of dissuading women from driving at the margin, compared to a world where cars are optimized for some intermediate case. That's deadweight loss, and deadweight loss has a real economic and social cost. In the extreme, you could imagine a world where there's a net increase of one death in exchange for generating billions of dollars. In that non-realized world, that'd be an obvious trade off worth making.
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.
This isn’t the first female crash test dummy at all. Dr. Mark Pearlman at University of Michigan invented a pregnant crash test dummy like 30 years ago. There are plenty of female crash test dummies.
Edit: according to congressional inquiry the NHTSA isn’t necessarily currently using “female” crash test dummies[0]. Still, they had been invented before.
This got me to do a quick search, which yields https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies. I'm curious how they pick which dummies to use, as they have 5th percentile for women there.
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?
Here's the NHSTA report for a 2015 Ford Focus, the female model is used in the passenger seat [1]. In a quick look I couldn't find any tests with female drivers though.
The male [2] and female [3] dummies look to be in different proportions.
The article specifically mentions the 5th percentile dummy you pointed out being inadequate:
> 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.
Ah, nice! I definitely didn't catch that on my read through. Curiously, this doesn't really answer if the new model can be seen as just a scaled up version of that?
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.
> Curiously, this doesn't really answer if the new model can be seen as just a scaled up version of that?
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.
Apologies, I think they established that there is a need to do a test on this. What I question, is that the 5% was such a specific choice for the existing tools, that I feel that it needs to also be established that that "chesterton's fence" wasn't picked by its own research. That make sense?
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
That does make sense, I don't think I understood what you were getting at before!
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.
Indeed. We almost routinely take it out now. Submitted title was "The First Female Crash Dummy Has Arrived". We've also changed the URL from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-c... to the original article it points to. Et tu, Smithsonian?
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.
So you're basically saying "We invented it 30 years ago, it can't be done better" ? What a snob.
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.
This is obviously a good thing - we should use crash dummies of all shapes and sizes, as people come in all shapes and sizes too.
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.
It’s not practical. Crashing cars is expensive and you need consistent data. You cannot use a different dummy on each test and expect to make sense of the data. The best we could do is come up with an acceptable model and use that for all/most tests. If we could accurately model crashes in software then there would be no limitation on doing thousands of crashes with all different dummy types.
Tall people (I am 195cm/6'5") generally require bigger cars to fit in (European D segment vehicles like BMW 3 series or Honda Accord are basically a small city car with barely usable rear seats when I am driving), and bigger cars have bigger mass. Hopefully electric cars with large cabins like IONIQ 5 are a start of fixing this :)
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.
A lot of injuries are happening from bottom belts cutting into bellies, because people don't know how to position the belt properly or the belt doesn't position well for people who have bellies (many women over middle age, pregnant women, etc). It's not just average height and weight that matters. Soft tissue positioning matters a lot. Women tend to accumulate weight in hips (pear shape), while men usually do it in the belly, so elevated thigh diameter in women when seated pushes the bottom belt up onto the belly/soft tissue which then gets cut during an accident. Regulators need to surface and approve belt adjusters that make seat-belts safer for pregnant and overweight people.
I have had the pleasure of meeting Dr Astrid Linder on a couple of occasions in the semi-distant past. Thoroughly impressive woman and this field of work (occupant diversity in crash testing) is very much her core area of expertise.
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
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadDo 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
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62877930
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.
[1] https://bmicalculator.mes.fm/bmi-chart
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.
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.
"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"
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
And i would bet that normal characteristics of testosterone would explain a sizable portion of the difference.
> 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.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
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 )
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 you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> 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.
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
(I know this forum doesn't take kindly to jokes, but at least now there's one that isn't sexist)
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.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
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.
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