Test Dummies Get Smarter : CRASH!
As the job of smashing cars into walls to test their crashworthiness has grown from a kind of backyard craft into a science, its primary measuring tool — the crash-test dummy — has developed from little more than a man-sized doll into a family of highly sensitive humanoids of synthetic flesh and bone.
“When this business started some 40 years ago, people were happy if we just saved their chest and head from being injured, because that’s how people get killed,” said Nagarajan Rangarajan, president of a crash-test dummy company called GESAC Inc., in Boonsboro, Maryland. “Now people are doing a good job of preventing serious injuries in the normal course of an accident, but we have injuries to the lower leg and to the face, which are not life-threatening, but that cost a lot of money to fix.”
The economic cost of car accidents and a recent realization by car manufacturers that safety sells has led to a worldwide proliferation of crash-test programs and research funded by both governments and private industry.
About 400,000 people are killed and 12 million injured in car accidents around the world every year. In the United States alone, car injuries cost $150 billion a year, according to the Department of Transportation.
But one of the drawbacks to this crash-testing boom is an imbroglio of test standards and dummy designs that has led to an uneven level of safety and a higher cost for cars as manufacturers spend money to meet a multiplicity of crash-test standards.
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