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Automotive Industry

A safe bet: fueled by the consumer's love affair with crash test rating, the auto industry's on-going, fervent development of safety technologies is a sure thing

Automotive Industries, March, 2004 by Carla Kalogeridis

In 1947, scattered about the desert sands of Roswell, New Mexico, the U.S. Air Force claimed it had discovered the crushed remains of a flying saucer and the bodies of alien beings. Practically overnight, every major newspaper west of Chicago carried a cover story detailing the five-foot tall human-like creatures with large heads, big hollow eye sockets, no ears, a small nose, a slit for a mouth and four fingers on each hand. The episode entered UFO folklore as "The Roswell Incident."

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Fifty years later, in 1997, the U.S. military released a report entitled, "Roswell Incident: Case Closed," which determined--or admitted, depending on how you want to look at it--that the Roswell "aliens" were really anthropomorphic dummies who were simply doing their job: ejecting out of airplanes at high speeds to help a maverick air force colonel named John Paul Stapp determine the maximum speed that pilots could eject from their planes safely. It seems the assumption that the dummies found in the desert were aliens was nothing more than a strange recipe of Cold War paranoia and secret scientific experiments coming to a boil.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stapp had personally volunteered for 26 potentially lethal experiments in his quest for learning how the human body responded to crashes at different speeds and angles. Stapp survived the experiments, but admitted that he had pushed human testing to the limit. If he was to continue his work on improving pilot safety, he needed a substitute.

Stapp teamed up with a man who made artificial limbs for injured soldiers returning from war. The early dummies were very crude, but the air force had a wealth of anthropomorphic data and before long, the dummies were replacing people in Stapp's myriad of experiments. The dummies were ejected from planes at high altitudes and parachuted down to earth. One such experiment run amok resulted in a couple of dummies landing in a Roswell drive-in movie theatre--the first of the "alien invasions."

While studying accidents and injuries sustained by air force pilots, Stapp discovered that pilots were hurt more often and more severely in the drive to and from the base than they were hurt in the air. And, of course, the problem wasn't unique to pilots. All over the United States, more and more motorists were dying on the road. It wasn't long before Stapp left the desert for the metropolis of Detroit.

Stapp become obsessed with automotive safety. By 1966, Congress passed a series of laws making car crash testing mandatory. Colonel Stapp quietly took his place as the father of automotive safety, and his dummy became the patron saint of the motorist.

It's a Hard Knock Life

Today's typical dummy contains 300 engineered parts and can cost up to $300,000 each. "It's a labor-intensive, low volume business," says Tom Gutwald, president of the leading dummy manufacturer, First Technology Safety Systems (FTSS) in Plymouth, Mich. FTSS manufactures about 20 to 30 dummies per month, plus a "ton of spare parts."

The current product line contains a whole family of dummies representing men, women and children of different sizes. THOR-FT is a sophisticated crash test dummy for the 21st century, a complicated representation of the human body and its various flexions, including a multi-directional neck, internal components that mimic the body's internal organs and even a leg and ankle limb that reflect the load path of the Achilles tendon.

On the flip side, FTSS also offers kill mathematical computer simulation versions of most crash tests. These computer simulations allow OEMs to perform simulated crash tests with an accuracy of five percent or better, a full 18 months before the OEM does any hardware development. "A big, full-crash simulation can take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to run on the computer; says Gutwald, "but these simulations save the industry a tremendous amount of money."

These days, the dummy's lead role is on the stage of side-impact testing. With the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) poised to announce an upgrade to its side-impact standard next month, OEMs are aggressively funding dummy research that can yield more refined crash-test data.

According to NHTSA, side-impact collisions kill 10,000 people a year in the U.S. "Side impact is definitely our top priority," concurs Rae Tyson, NHTSA's spokesperson. "The new generation of crash test dummies has helped us understand better what's happening to the human body in a side-impact crash. Over the last several years, the change in our fleet regarding the ratio of light trucks and SUVs to passenger cars has necessitated an improved side-impact standard."

Tyson says once it's released, NHTSA's proposed upgrade will stay out for public comment for 120 days; U.S. automakers will respond and suggest modifications during that time. After that, the new role will be published within 12 months, while the actual phase-in of the regulation will take several years.

Automotive Industry

A safe bet: fueled by the consumer's love affair with crash test rating, the auto industry's on-going, fervent development of safety technologies is a sure thing

Automotive Industries, March, 2004 by Carla Kalogeridis

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