The face of a crash test dummy looks eerily vacant. With indents instead of eyes, a pointy nose, and permanently pursed lips, it appears remarkably expressionless—especially considering it’s ...

One reason for that might be there is no crash test dummy that represents the average female body used in car safety testing, despite women making up more than half of all licensed U.S. drivers.

Anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs): Metal/rubber/plastic crash dummies used by the automotive, health care, sports and aerospace industries to measure impacts on the human body.

Since then, these crash test dummies have become more advanced and more representative of a human body – well, a male body, at least. This is exactly where the problem lies.

Far from being simply a human-sized hunk of unthinking steel and foam rubber, today's crash test dummies are high-tech instruments that help save countless lives.

The world's leading crash-test dummy producer, Humanetics, has developed a new, obese human stand-in that weighs 273 pounds with a Body Mass Index of 35.

Hu and his team are replacing real crash test dummies with a virtual body – called a ‘human model’ – built in a computer. “We go beyond just a single fat dummy,” he says.

Ford digital child crash test dummy – Click above for high-res image gallery Ford has started working on a digital child body model to better understand the effects of car crashes on youngsters.

Old crash test dummies on display at Humanetics in Farmington Hills. The company continues to improve its crash test technology to adapt to different body shapes and automotive features.

In the 1940s, researchers would throw just about anything at a wall—anesthetized pigs, human cadavers—to gain an understanding of a high-speed collision’s effect on the body. Thankfully, the ...