Who are you calling dummy?
They work long hours, they spend every night in the office, have lengthy careers with no promotion prospects and never take a holiday. Yet don't utter a word of complaint, even when their heads are being dropped to test their bounciness: welcome to the under-celebrated world of Crash Test Dummies.
Some of the first crash test occupants were actually real people. Sometimes live volunteers (most notably being fired at 600mph in aeroplane ejector-seat tests), or sometimes, rather gruesomely, bodies. As you can imagine, either situation was far from ideal!
No surprise, then, that as crash protection became more important for consumers and car manufacturers such as Volvo, which places safety at the very top of its agenda, demand arose for reusable mannequins that could give consistent, repeatable crash-test results.
The first of these weren't particularly advanced - dye-coated dummies that left indelible marks where they'd struck car interiors. Today, crash test dummies are far more sophisticated, costing upwards of £100,000 apiece. During a crash test, which may only last around a tenth of a second, a typical dummy's sensors will record over 30,000 pieces of data.
Volvo uses some of the world's most advanced crash test dummies. One of the reasons that Volvo is at the forefront of whiplash injury safety, for example, is because it uses BioRID dummies, which are designed specifically to assess the effects of rear impacts. The BioRID has a sophisticated spinal construction with vertebrae simulators - data taken from it has allowed Volvo to develop and refine its WHIPS (Whiplash Protection System) to world-beating levels.
What is difficult to simulate with a real dummy, however, is the effect of a crash on a pregnant woman. Hence, Volvo has developed the world's first pregnant crash test dummy - and she's virtual. 'Linda' is a computer model that simulates women of different sizes and, crucially, during different stages of pregnancy.
As computer simulation becomes more advanced, virtual dummies like Linda will doubtless become more widespread and accurate. However, so long as legislation requires that real metal is crash-tested, there'll be no substitute - and hence, no rest - for the real crash test dummy.
