The transportation department has unveiled a first crash test dummy in the US modeled specifically on female anatomy, a move officials say is meant to close decades of safety gaps in vehicle testing.
Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, unveiled the THOR-05F, an advanced female design for a crash-test dummy with upgraded technical specifications. According to the transportation department, the dummy will be incorporated into federal vehicle crash testing once a final rule is published.
Although men make up the majority of annual car-crash victims, women are more likely to die in collisions of comparable severity. Women are also 73% more likely than men to sustain serious injuries in a crash, according to studies. In addition, they face a higher risk of specific trauma, including pelvis and liver injuries.
“And here we see the seatbelt sliding sideways to squash one boob and cut into the side of the female dummy’s neck because it’s not sufficiently adjustable. Meanwhile we notice that in order to be able to fully depress the brake pedal, the female dummy must position the seat so close to the steering column that the airbag will likely cause severe injury.”
They’ve been told these things by actual living women for decades but maybe they’ll find it harder to ignore the proof from the plastic dummy.
Yep. I’m a 5’5" woman with short legs and a long torso. In order to fully depress the clutch on my car, I have to have the seat nearly all the way forward. There are plenty of other signs that my car was built for a 6’ tall man, but that’s a biggie.
They would have to make two cars of each model, one for women and one for men. Where’s the profit in that when it’s easier to just ignore those issues.
Or just incorporate more modular designs. Steering columns are only made for the middle ~70% of drivers. Anyone outside of that on the bell curve will struggle to get their steering column adjusted properly. It will either be too short, (meaning they have to reach too far for the steering wheel, and the airbag won’t fully cushion their impact), or too long, (meaning they’re cramped when driving, and dangerously close to the airbag when it deploys).
For instance, I’m tall. I have proportionally long legs. In order to be able to properly reach the pedals without my knees next to my ears, I need my car seat basically all the way back. But that means I’m constantly reaching for the steering wheel, which doesn’t extend far enough to be comfortable. It also means that if I hit something, my airbag basically won’t do anything. I may rub my face on it, but the vast majority of the stop is going to be handled by the seatbelt. Meaning my left shoulder and collarbone will take the brunt of the force instead of having it evenly distributed across my torso. It also means I’ll be more likely to develop whiplash, as my head won’t be sufficiently cushioned by the airbag until after it has already snapped almost all the way forward.
Volvo tried at one point.
Honestly surprised some auto manufacturer hasn’t tried this in a production vehicle
The profit is in the pink tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_tax
I think when it comes to gendered cars there would be more of a “blue” tax I guess. There are just a lot more guys obsessed with cars whan women
You are using quotes, but what are you quoting? Because it’s not from the article.
Are you quoting yourself?
Hey Buffalox, coming in later and seeing all the downvotes, I’m sorry, you don’t deserve them. I was deliberately using phrasing that English or American people would recognize from certain kinds of public instruction short films or nature shows, and also in comic parodies of those films. Specifically, “And here we see…” as the opener. As a Dane, that might not be familiar to you. And I used quotation marks to indicate I was doing the (usually rather pompous) voice of that kind of narrator.
But I probably should have prefaced it.
Oddly, you’ll notice in my history my prefacing quotes with
From the article:
followed by the quote and then
From me:
for my comment.
Thanks, I must admit I find it strange why my post is so controversial?
It seems some people tend to forget that people come here from all over the world, despite the name of the server is lemmy.world.
Looking at the thread, I bet some people didn’t downvote your initial comment at first, then kept reading and got to “moronic” and your off-topic little rant about “Not everything is USA or Anglo-style body shame double standards, where saying boop makes things 21+. And requires parental warnings more than showing people killing each other.”
And that’s when they went back and downvoted your whole string.
By the way, there’s nothing in my comment that would be NSFW even in the US.
Then you bet wrong, because the downvote ratio was way higher before I wrote the other posts.
They were using quotes to write in the voice of a hypothetical character. The tone signaled that to me pretty much immediately and I’d be a bit surprised to find any significant number of people took this as an actual quote.
In that case the normal thing to do is to lead with
Narrator:
Not to make a false quote.
Pretty moronic that I’m downvoted for pointing out it’s not actually a quote of the article.
I hear you and basically agree. Tone can be tough to manage on either end.
I think the downvotes are also a tonal thing. People are taking you as being overly-critical, though Im pretty youre genuinely trying to be helpful. People, am I right?
The tone made it very obvious it was not a real quote.
Nothing else was needed.
Okay. Can we take a minute to just acknowledge that this comment has a little neurotypical ableism and regional bias? Some people literally need more context than others do to understand the tone of a text. Just because you do not need that assistance with context clues in play doesn’t mean everyone also doesn’t need that.
Kindness and extending a little help costs us so little.
Tone is not something that everyone can pick up equally. If you have an option to make it clearer, why are you people so determined that it mustn’t be changed?
That presumes people have read the article, and can see the difference in tone.
As a Dane there would be nothing wrong in having a similar tone in an article.
Not everything is USA or Anglo body shame, where showing a naval makes things 21+.