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(c) Steve Hathaway
Now for a crash course in the latest in crash test dummies. The dummies are going digital. But don’t go throwing a retirement party for them just yet. The avatars are still a ways down the road. Besides, the current crash testers are pretty high tech themselves.
Setting the gold standard for crash testing dummies is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in Ruckersville, Virginia. You’ve probably heard of them because of their annual safety ratings cool crash videos. Who can resist watching a brand new Beemer or GM or Ford smack into a wall at 40 miles-per-hour? And it’s no accident that their crashes look so good.
The IIHS runs about 90 crashes a year, destroying about 70 new vehicles to crunch its numbers. To do it they’ve got a studio that would make a few people in Hollywood drool: an armada of incredibly fast slow-motion cameras (the faster you shoot, the more information the picture has for slowing it down), a 600-foot runway with stark white walls, floor and ceiling. Every test has to be precisely calibrated so it is exactly the same as the previous one. After all, you can’t compare one car’s safety to another if you’re not spot-on with the measurements. Although with all that high tech equipment they’re still using one of my favorite analog devices to check for accuracy – a tape measure. By the way my fav: the Brannock Device, it’s the one the salesman used when your Mom took you for your new school shoes.
While the IIHS has no regulatory abilities, they can indirectly bring about safety changes by pointing out the flaws in carmaker’s products. What they’ve also found is that if one manufacturer makes a safety change as a result of their findings, the others fall in line as well.
Just as important as the cars are the dummies behind the wheel. These are pricey dummies. The stripped down version runs about $ 50,000 while a fully loaded model with up to 50 sensors costs about $250,000. That makes the full dummy family part of the 1-percent. The dummy family is a big one – ranging in size from infant to the 95-percent male. At 6’8” and 223 pounds 95% man is larger than 95% of the population. Kind of like the LeBron James of dummies.
Most of the crash testing is done with the 5-foot 9-inch 170 pound “Mid-sized Male” aka “50% Man.” Because it’s so expensive to run the tests they need to do “average” testing. Therein lies one of the major flaws with using the dummies. Hardly anyone is mid-sized male.
That’s why we went to Ann Arbor Michigan, to UMTRI (University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute). They’re tackling that problem in their own crash room and computer lab. They’re focusing on the fringes, older drivers, the disabled, and obese travelers. The day we were there they were crashing a dummy strapped in a wheelchair.
I need to stop here for a second and note that one of the coolest parts of producing for TechKnow is you can ask researchers to show you “how it works.” And they’re so happy to oblige. Nothing like the exhilaration of watching a human sized mannequin strapped to a chair hurtling down the tracks at 40MPH slamming into a wall. BAM! And OH!, Can you do it AGAIN! And after 40 minutes to reset -- they did it again. BAM!
Sure it’s fun until you ask yourself: what if it was a real person? Then its not so fun. If this had been an actual emergency, the disabled dummy would have slid right out from under the seat belt into whatever was in front of it. That’s more than just ouch. This research is going to lead to ways to make cars safer for the wheelchair population.
The IIHS does do an incredible job of predicting the types of injuries that the “mid-sized male” body will sustain in a collision. But, its findings are limited to dummies of a certain size because no one wants to be a real crash test dummy. (Although there was such a man, and by no means a dummy. Wayne State University Professor Lawrence Patrick and his students permitted themselves to get whacked with hard objects to see how their bodies would respond to a collision). Dummies aren’t flesh and blood or tendons or spleens. The IIHS can predict injuries to the neck, chest, pelvis and bones in the limbs. But, they cannot predict injuries to soft tissue and internal organs. And that’s what brought us 2 flights up from the crash lab to the UMTRI’s computer department.
They’re using a full body laser scanner to make computational crash test dummies of all shapes and sizes. For instance, our TechKnow contributor Dr. Shini Somora - very tall and lanky (who bravely wore a bulky sweater!) stood for her body scan. She’s one of thousands of people they plan to scan -- tall and short, cherubic and skinny, the young and the old. UMTRI and a consortium of automotive stakeholders are in the early stages of perfecting the algorithm to build crash test avatars that include internal organs. To supplement that process, UMTRI students are taking thousands of anonymized MRIs and CT scans from the University’s hospital to create more computational innards. Those are expected to give more accurate information on the deep down destruction of a body from a collision. The wide variety of body types will give a better understanding of the injury outcomes not just to mid-sized man but to everyone who hits the road and gets hit on the road. And those crashes can be simulated on the computer over and over and over again saving time and money.
It sounds great on paper and looks better on the screen. But even the researchers at UMTRI admit the dummies aren’t going anywhere (except of course slamming into an airbag). How come? To accurately test new vehicles the car manufacturers would need to provide computer models for every new car every year. Right now that’s a logistical nightmare. So while the dummies are getting smarter, they’re going to be on that crash course quite a while longer.
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