PJH Studios

Tag: automobiles

  • The Moylan Arrow

    That little arrow on your dashboard that points either left or right, tells you which side of your gas tank is on. It’s such a simple design, and it even has a name, The Moylan Arrow, named after the engineer, Jim Moylan.

    “I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” 

    The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.   

    “Based on personal experience,” he wrote, “I feel that this little indicator would remove the guesswork of which side I want to park.” He continued: “For the minor investment involved on the company’s part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience.” 

    Very soon, everything became a standard design feature in nearly every car

  • The making of a crash test dummy

    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.