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> 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
by mythhouse 4y ago
> 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.
- ilyt 4y agoStats 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.
- klyrs 4y agoThe 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.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoLower momentum one way or the other sounds like the best predictor.
- Xamayon 4y agoJust '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...
- tjoff 4y agoThat 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.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoFit 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.
- ilyt 4y agoRight 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
- voxic11 4y agoUsing only averages can lead to pretty misleading results. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
- hirundo 4y agoWhich is a good argument for using a range of test values, not for using less representative values.
- kolbe 4y agoCars aren't cheap
- thfuran 4y agoCompared to the cost of designing a car then manufacturing hundreds of thousands or millions of them, a handful of cars are pretty cheap.
- kolbe 4y agoDepends 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.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoWhen I worked at Toyota, they used "number of Highlanders" equivalence when shaming people for not picking up their large format paper schematic prints.
- Tade0 4y agoAccording to this: https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/ 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.
- vxNsr 4y agoAsking 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.
- KarlKode 4y agoI think you mean the median.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIf 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.
- prydwen 4y agoA 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.
- treis 4y agoDummies 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.
- watwut 4y agoThe 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.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoThe 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.
- watwut 4y agoThey don't need to move much. The issue I noticed is that when my breasts grew, some safety belts went through throat (previously did not). They push the belt to the side.
- anotherman554 4y agoI 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.
- mythhouse 4y agoNHTSA uses the word average not median.
- ryeights 4y agoMedian is an average.
- lukeschlather 4y agoNHTSA says 50th percentile: https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
- mythhouse 4y agoAh Thanks. I was going off the image in the linked article https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62877930 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62877930
- 988747 4y agoSo the average American woman looks like a ball chair, basically? Something is wrong with your data here :)
- alistairSH 4y agoThe 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.
- adrianN 4y agoI 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.
- alistairSH 4y agoOh yeah, as noted in parallel comments, averages are terrible for things like designing airplane cockpits, and I imagine crash dummies as well. 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.
- bombcar 4y agoNote 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.
- Blahah 4y agoThat difference is visually absolutely vast - for the same height, in most sizing charts, it's approximating a 50% increase in body mass.
- starkd 4y ago
- nharada 4y agoYour 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.