Average female and male dummy responses in rear impact tests with car seats compared to real-world injury outcomes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55329/jdzx2893Keywords:
average female and male crash test dummies, real world injury data, sled testing, vehicle occupant safety, whiplash injury, Northern EuropeAbstract
Globally, 1.19 million people lose their lives annually in the road transport system, and around 10 million people are severely injured. Motor vehicle crashes resulting in soft tissue neck injuries, referred to as whiplash injuries, are the most common and costly disabling injuries for vehicle occupants. Injury statistics show that seat design plays an important role in the protection from these injuries in low severity rear impact crashes. In addition, the injury protection varies based on occupant sex. Relatively, most car models provide better protection for males, although that is not always the case. The hypothesis of this study was that vehicle seats that have shown different real-world performance regarding whiplash protection between female and male car occupants can be identified in crash tests with crash test dummies representing both sexes of the population. In the assessment of occupant safety, both in regulation and consumer tests, the average male model represents the average adult occupant. In this study an average female and male crash test dummy was used in tests at 16 km/h in two different seats (Saab 9-3 and Audi A4), which had shown significant differences in neck injury protection performance for females and males in real-world injury crashes. The results showed noticeable differences in the dynamic responses, highlighting that evaluation results for one dummy sex, exclusively, are inadequate for providing insights into the dynamic response of the other. This is the world’s first published study using average size, mass, geometry and dynamic properties models of the two main types of the adult population, females and male, in the assessment of injury protection in a crash and showing the link between real-life injury outcome and assessment of safety performances pointing to the future of how a more robust assessment of occupant safety can be achieved to further reduced the loss of life and health in the road transport system.
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Author Biographies
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Astrid Linder, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Chalmers University of Technology, Monash University
Astrid Linder is Professor of Traffic Safety at Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, VTI, an Adjunct Professor at Chalmers University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia. She received her PhD in traffic safety from Chalmers in 2002, from where she also has an MSc in Engineering Physics. Traffic safety, models of the human in crash testing, injury prevention and crash related countermeasures are main fields of her research.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
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Anders Kullgren, Folksam Insurance Group, Sweden, Chalmers University of Technology
Anders Kullgren is head of the Research Department Folksam Insurance Group and an Adjunct Professor at Chalmers University of Technology. He received a PhD degree from Karolinska Institutet, in 1998. The main research areas are analyses of real-world crash data, including crashworthiness analyses of cars and effectiveness studies of various safety technologies, and traffic safety from a systems perspective.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
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Mats Svensson, Chalmers University of Technology
Mats Svensson is Full Professor of Injury Prevention and head of the Vehicle Safety Division at Chalmers University of Technology. He received his PhD degree from Chalmers in 1993 on the topic of neck injuries in rear-end collisions. His main research field is impact biomechanics, experimental biomechanics, crash test dummy development and development of crash test procedures. He has his key expertise in whiplash injury biomechanics.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Astrid Linder, Anders Kullgren, Mats Svensson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Horizon 2020
Grant numbers Grant Agreement No. 768960
