Average female and male dummy responses in rear impact tests with car seats compared to real-world injury outcomes

Journal article, 2026

Globally, 1.19 million people lose their lives annually in the road transport system, and
around 10 million people are severely injured. Motor vehicle crashes resulting in soft
tissue neck injuries, referred to as whiplash injuries, are the most common and costly
disabling injuries for vehicle occupants. Injury statistics show that seat design plays an
important role in the protection from these injuries in low severity rear impact crashes.
In addition, the injury protection varies based on occupant sex. Relatively, most car
models provide better protection for males, although that is not always the case. In
the assessment of occupant safety, both in regulation and consumer tests, the average
male model represents the average adult occupant. The hypothesis of this study
was that vehicle seats that have shown different real-world performance regarding
whiplash protection between female and male car occupants, could show differences
in dynamic responses for crash test dummies representing both sexes in crash tests.
In this study an average female and male crash test dummy were used in tests at
16 km/h in two different seats (Saab 9-3 and Audi A4), which had shown significant
differences in neck injury protection performance for females and males in real-world
injury crashes. The results showed noticeable differences in the dynamic responses,
highlighting that evaluation results for one dummy sex, exclusively, are inadequate
for providing insights into the dynamic response of the other. This study is pioneering
assessing crash injury protection for the two main types of the adult population, female
and male, using average size, mass, geometry and dynamic properties models, that also
shows the link between real-life injury outcome and assessment of safety performances
pointing to the future of how a more robust assessment of occupant safety can be
achieved to further reduced the loss of life and health in the road transport system.