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At First Technology workshops, technician Saundra Rhea-Rogers puts finishing touches on a crash-dummy head; completed dummies (below) await shipment.
from a chamber recessed below the steering wheel to preclude the driver's chest from coming too close. At the moment, he has hoisted a female dummy nearly to the ceiling, dangling it above a steering wheel. He is in a control room, where red warning lights flash. Bright camera lights come on. When the countdown reaches zero, the dummy plunges toward the steering wheel at 12 mph. just before the dummy hits, the air bag housed in the steering wheel bursts open, and the falling dummy is engulfed in a Cloud of cornstarch, used as a lubricant in the bag. Wolanin studies a video replay.
On the screen, the dummy's breasts are hitting the steering wheel in slow motion. As the air bag erupts, the dummy's neck bends backward frighteningly. "It's just below the threshold of breaking a neck," he says, checking a readout. (The problem, he says, is that some motorists believe air bags mean they can eschew seat belts.
But lap and shoulder belts cut crash deaths by 42 percent, while the addition of air bags adds only another 9 percent of protection. And seat belts keep car occupants from lurching too close to an unfurling air bag.) "We have many thousands of benign deployments for every one of these, and if you wear seat belts it will almost never happen," says Wolanin. "But, still, why not make the air bags a little better?"
The dummies are willing. In fact, they have already helped. The U.S. fatality rate is about 40,000 per year, a disturbing figure. Yet, according to GM physicist Leonard Evans, author of Traffic Safety And The Driver, a standard work, traffic statistics reveal good news too. "The number of deaths per mile of travel is now more than 90 percent lower than it was in 1922," he says, citing, among other factors, government regulation, improved occupant protection and more-crashworthy cars.
As crash statistics shift, dummies continue to evolve "The dummies used today were designed for unbelted drivers, and we sense that today's dummies are no longer sophisticated enough for today's situation," says Ian Lau, GM's head of automotive safety and health research. He says seat belts and air bags are doing so well at protecting motorists from catastrophic upper-body injuries that safety engineers are now noticing how floor pans deform in crashes and cause disabling lower-leg injuries. "So we're beginning to design better lower-leg responses for dummies." Not long ago, the researchers added skin to dummies' necks because inflating air bags were getting into their neck vertebrae.
Dummies become ever more like us. One is even pregnant. David Viano, a GM biomechanics expert, and Dr. Mark Pearlman, a University of Michigan gynecologist, teamed up to produce the expectant dummy, causing them some bemusement. "I've been asked, 'How did that dummy get pregnant?"' says Pearlman. "And whether Vince or Larry, the dummies in Department of Transportation safety commercials, did it."
In fact, Viano and Pearlman did it, no easy task. The project began in 1992. Pearlman had, in 1984, treated a woman who had lost her unborn child in a minor car accident. He joined forces with Viano to design a seat-belt system that would better accommodate expectant mothers, since automobile accidents may terminate as many as 4,000 pregnancies each year in the United States. That meant developing a pregnant Hybrid III dummy to test experimental belt designs. Another question to address is how air bags will affect pregnant women.
Viano and Pearlman are still perfecting their seven-months-pregnant dummy. Right now the vinyl fetus, with the correct weight and consistency, has an abstract, cloud-like shape because they have to fit instruments inside. To emulate the amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus they hit upon a gel. They intend to study the effects of a car crash on a pregnant woman because the
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