Good News For Female Drivers in America
- Editor OGN Daily
- 59 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Currently, for vehicle safety testing, the standard “female” crash test dummy weighs 108 pounds and is 4 feet, 11 inches tall. It was created in the 1970s and is based on the smallest 5 percent of American women.
Therefore, you could easily argue (and many have) that it's hardly surprising that recent studies have found that women are 73 percent likelier to be seriously injured in head-on car crashes compared with men in the same crashes. And female drivers and front-seat passengers are 17 percent likelier to be killed than their male counterparts in the same seats.
But it took over four decades for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to finally approve the use of a dummy anatomically representative of the average female in terms of height, weight and body type - even though advanced models have been available for years.
At least now, for the first time ever, American car companies will shortly be required to test vehicle safety using dummies that are representative of women. Even though more women today hold driver’s licenses than men.
Senators Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb., who are behind the She DRIVES Act - legislation to modernize vehicle safety standards, including by using female crash test dummies - praised the announcement. "It’s far past time to make these testing standards permanent," Fischer told NBC News, "which will help save thousands of lives and make America’s roads safer for all drivers."
Duckworth said: "Any progress here is good, because there’s simply no good reason why women are more likely to be injured or die in car crashes."
