A lot of consideration goes into a crash test dummy — making sure they move like a real person.
But it’s absolutely essential that they move like a real body would, and record the forces a body would experience.
That means a head that weighs what a human head would weigh, moving on a neck that’s about as bendy as a real neck. The dummies’ design is informed by data taken from living people’s bodies, as well as from cadavers put through their own crash tests — and the new female dummy design, crucially, is informed by data from female bodies. Previous “female” dummies were modified versions of male dummies, and safety advocates have long argued that the resulting anatomical inaccuracies contribute to higher rates of injuries among women than men in real crashes.