This is Thor, the latest and greatest crash test dummy.
It is built almost entirely by hand and loaded with data-harvesting sensors.
Governments, automakers and others will pay up to $1 million for just one of these, only to put it into a car
and smash it over and over again.
The data they collect will provide insights that save lives and limbs.
The latest generation dummy is far more sophisticated than earlier versions.
Its design is more true to life or bio fidelity.
It behaves a lot more like a real human in a crash.
On the inside, it is stocked with a far larger number of sensors than previous models.
It also has an advanced data storage system.
It is also meant to address a long-standing problem.
Historically, dummies have been built to approximate the body of an average American male.
"So women make up 51% of the population.
We are 51% of the drivers, but nothing in car safety is really geared towards us, so none of our injuries are being
accounted for. We are 17 to 19% more likely to die in the same accident as a man and 73% more likely to be
injured. And that's because we're not testing for a woman.
So we have to move towards this to make sure that we aren't putting women in danger."
Even the male crash test dummy has become less accurate to life as people have grown heavier.
Vehicle safety rating groups around the world — Europe, China, Japan — have already adopted the latest generation of
crash test dummies.
So have many automakers.
But the U.S. government has not yet made the switch.
Some in the automotive world are reluctant to embrace a design they say is not ready yet.
We are here at Humanetics outside Detroit, Michigan, and this company is the largest maker of crash test
dummies in the world.
Humanetics controls about 90 to 95% of the crash test dummy market.
The latest generation of dummies is the result of decades of innovation.
Like seatbelts, crash test dummies were a concept the automotive industry borrowed from aviation.
Around 1950, an inventor named Samuel Alderson created the first-known dummy, originally as a
device for testing ejection seats in air and spacecraft.
Dummies are also known as anthropomorphic test devices or ATVs.
Alderson founded the company that later became Humanetics, but beginnings in automotive were modest.
Until about the 1970s, when automakers tested for safety at all, they typically did so with human cadavers or
animals, dead or alive.
Automaker General Motors created many of the basic dummy designs to which today's dummies can be traced.
"General Motors in the early 70s thought there was better ways to develop crash test dummies, and they initiated
work on the development of the Hybrid III dummy, starting off with the 50th percentile male dummy,
which is kind of a standard in the workhorse ATD that the industry has been using for quite some time."
The idea of building dummies for women took hold in the early 1980s.
"The Hybrid III was developed in the 1980s, and it is based on the male 50th percentile dummy of the same time
and is basically a scaled-down version of the male.
Her bio fidelity is not based off of females' bio fidelity."
Starting in about the late 1990s, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began working on a new
generation of dummies.
These were meant to be more true to life, and capable of capturing a lot more data
"The development of Thor took place literally over 30 some years, which is really embarrassing to say that it takes so
long to get an advanced piece of equipment."
Different teams of scientists, engineers and regulators in Europe and the United States worked on designs, trying to
find one that would meet the different standards on different continents.
"So a combined one did come out, and the most recent Thor was actually initially funded by
NHTSA, where Human Ethics developed the first three prototypes for NHTSA and provided that to them.
That was now 12, 13 years ago.
And then there's a lot of advancements that happen on the continuous work, and that's the contribution that
Humanetics continues to do."
Humanetics is privately-owned and is headquartered in Farmington Hills, Michigan, within a short drive of the
largest American automakers.
The company's largest factory is two hours away in Huron, Ohio.
"It's all handwork.
If you notice the round of our production, it's not an automated assembly line.
It's-it's more of a lot of careful craftsmanship.
You have to do parts almost on a one-by-one basis."
The company ships about 300 complete dummies every year.
There are also a lot of spare parts used to repair worn-down or broken dummies in the field.
The dummies are meant to simulate the anatomy of the human body, while still being durable enough to withstand hundreds
or even thousands of crashes.
Though some parts need fixing or replacing over time, a dummy is engineered to last decades.
"So this is an example of a of a molded head skin.
It's solid vinyl.
We mold it here.
It hasn't been trimmed up and finished.
But what it does is it actually goes over an aluminum skull.
The dummy has a hard skull and it has a flesh that goes around the skull to try to mimic a little bit about-a little
bit of the head of-of an actual person."
Dummies have to be tested extensively.
Every dummy needs to be made to exact specifications and each one has to be identical to every other.
The dummy needs to behave exactly as expected.
"We raise these pendulums, and we let them swing, and they swing into the thorax of the dummy.
So we're checking the rib cage.
We're checking to see how much deflection we get from that impact.
Too much deflection, the rib cage is too soft.
Too little deflection, the rib cage is too stiff.
So it has to fall into that right, just right corridor to be able to be certified and used in a crash test."
Each one of these dummies is loaded with sensors that are made at Humanetics headquarters.
Newer dummy models have many more sensors than older ones, a big factor that accounts for the million dollar price tag.
"She has much more technology in her than the other dummy.
So the Hybrid III only has about 12 sensors altogether.
The Thor-5F has 138 sensors fully-loaded.
So she has about five in just in the front of her face to measure impact of an air bag.
And she's got a bunch of others in her head as well.
She's got tilting meters, accelerometers, so she has much more going on."
"Now we have, instead of a single way to track a thorax injury, which is a common injury in a vehicle, we have more
of a three- and a four-dimensional view that happens within that thorax."
Newer dummies are also equipped with pricey onboard systems that collect data from those sensors.
Older versions have large cords coming out of them, which can affect how the dummy moves in a crash.
This is a big part of what makes them so much more expensive than their predecessors.
Newer dummies are also built both to look more like real people and move like them.
"The rib cage they're actually— when you look at it and you compare side-by-side, they're actually shaped more
human-like. That crash test dummy actually moves more human-like.
The older dummy basically pivots just forward and back.
This will actually rotate and turn."
This advanced engineering is also responsible for their higher
cost.
Humanetics makes about 40 different types of dummies.
There are adult-sized dummies.
"So this one right here is a Hybrid III 50th.
So he's-he's one of our oldest generations from the seventies, still used in many government basic
regulations. So it's a frontal impact dummy only.
This one is called a EuroSID.
He's a 50 percentile male side impact dummy.
He's only used in side impacts.
Next to him is actually a Thor-5F, so he's also a 50th percentile, but he's our next generation of dummies, and our
fifth female dummy.
She's our small hybrid, 350F."
And there are child sizes.
"We have a number of different kinds of dummies, different sizes.
They come in from newborns all the way to ten-year-old in the child range.
A lot of those are used for different auto position tests and car seat manufacturers.
Child seat manufacturers use them to test their products before they put them on the market."
The Hybrid III male dummy is made to approximate the body measurements of a male at the 50th percentile in
height and weight.
That is basically a man in the middle of the U.S.
population. That dummy is 5 feet, 9 inches tall and 171 pounds.
The female version is called the Hybrid 35-F.
It is supposed to represent a female in the fifth percentile of height and weight, among the smallest people
occupying a vehicle.
But the 5-foot tall 110 pound 5-F is really just a scaled-down version of the male, with
male rather than female proportions.
Hybrid III dummies are what NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety use in their frontal crash
tests. But these dummies are no longer representative of average-sized people in the United States.
"We're seeing that the current injuries being affected for drivers has varied over
time, and a lot of that variation comes with the fact that people have changed in size and not
just getting, you know, taller, but also getting larger in different areas."
The female Thor dummy is designed to more closely mimic the anatomy and weight distribution of a true female.
"So she's actually designed based on a woman's bio fidelity versus the scaled-down men's rib cage.
So this is an actual woman's rib cage, and she's actually has the built-in chest plate."
The dummy is loaded with sensors in areas where women are more likely to be injured.
"So she has sensors basically everywhere.
She has several in her head, multiple in her torso, in her abdomen, all through her legs.
So in her leg, women tend to suffer from lower leg injuries more than men do.
So we have several in her leg, including tibia.
We have rotational in her ankle.
We also have an Achilles sensor as well."
Prices for a Humanetics dummy range from about $100,000 for a very stripped-down older model to about
$1 million for the latest Thor model full-loaded.
There are now hundreds of Thor dummies around the world.
The dummy has not yet been officially adopted by NHTSA.
That means automakers are not required to use the Thor dummy when running their own crash tests.
NHTSA itself doesn't yet use it in its New Car Assessment Program.
The NCAP program publicly rates cars based on how well they perform on safety tests, including crash tests.
"Essentially, you need a rule maker, be it in Europe or the U.S.
or in Japan or China, to set the rules, to set the guidelines that say we need to
test for these different variable populations."
The NCAP program has inspired similar programs around the world, and many of them already use at least one of the Thor
models.
"The Thor 50th is already part of the European NCAP since 2020.
It's now part of the China NCAP.
It's part of the Japan NCAP.
And we're hoping that NHTSA will adopt it here.
They-they have said for the last five years they will be adopting it, and we expect it to be adopted in the near
future."
The dummies and Humanetics' other products, such as virtual crash testing software, are also sold to companies up and
down the automotive supply chain.
Automakers, for example, run extensive crash tests to validate their products.
"Any given development, any given project that we're working on, we can run up to 70, 80 full-scale crash
tests. We do full range of front crash, side crash, rear crash,
component-level, like whiplash testing."
Honda has about 50 dummies in its fleet right now.
They range from child size to full-size, dummies built for front crash tests, side-impact crash tests and
so on. Honda has invested in the latest generation of dummies, including the Thor dummy."
"And my background's biomedical engineering, so I love that, the whole aspect of these dummies becoming more human-like,
more bio fidelic."
The new dummy actually presented a challenge for the automaker.
The sensors captured much more information than Honda had the tools to process.
"The information that these new dummies give us with all of the sensors and all the, you know, the rotational sensors
and the different deflection areas that-that the old dummies didn't have.
Again, it's very valuable for us because we can get into the details."
Honda says more work needs to be done to make sure the dummies are durable, reliable and give repeatable results.
"We've done a lot of work on studying the repeatability, the reliability, the durability of these dummies.
And from a manufacturer standpoint, that's huge, because we're down into the millimeters of design changes
sometimes. So we want to make sure that that tool, that dummy, is always repeatable.
And no matter what we do, anything we change, we know it's because of a countermeasure and not because of some
instability that the dummy has given us."
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is a nonprofit organization funded by the insurance industry.
It runs an array of tests on new vehicles to assess their road worthiness and safety for occupants.
The group's top safety picks are widely-publicized and advertised by automakers.
IIHS uses Humanetics dummies in its tests, but has been reluctant to invest in the Thor dummy.
"One of the things we have found when we've used it is it breaks too often, right?
We don't always get the measures we want.
And what a recent study shows — we conducted a wide range of crashes and compared it to some real world data — is that
what we were looking for was a dummy that gives us a better predictor of what the current dummies weren't doing very
well, which is predicting the injuries are still left in the real world that we'd like to address, which are chest
injuries. Our analysis of that dummy showed it didn't do a better job of predicting
those types of injuries.
And so, we have decided, we are not going to move forward with that new latest and greatest
dummy."
The cost is also daunting.
One of the problems with this dummy is not only is it very expensive, but it is expensive to maintain.
And when things break on it, you can't always just turn it around and repair it as quickly as the old dummy.
IIHS uses other means to account for variations in human size.
"We also assess how that structure holds up around the occupant.
In our frontal crash test, we use a dummy that represents a mid-sized male.
Well, you're going to want to make sure that that occupant compartment stays in shape and doesn't collapse around,
say, a very large male or a smaller occupant that is sitting further forward.
And so we try to put all of this together to try to come up with an assessment that benefits a wide
range of real world occupants."
Humanetics said it works closely with its customers to address durability issues and is improving the Thor line.
"Well, I think there's always going to be some questions when you're changing changing tools.
It's a process of when do we-when do we decide to improve the technology that we have?
If we-if we try and wait for the perfect tool, time goes on, and we're losing the
opportunity to provide some additional benefit for-for our customers.
It's a healthy discussion to understand where there may be some gaps or some areas of improvement.
But we've been working and researchers have been working on the Thor dummy series for quite a long time.
We believe we're ready."
In its most recent update in early March, NHTSA said it plans to begin using the Thor-50M dummy in its NCAP tests.
It, however, made no mention of the latest female dummy.
NHTSA told CNBC that the bipartisan infrastructure law will allow the agency to accelerate its
research to complete the development and documentation of the Thor 5th percentile female crash test dummy.
"The biggest challenge we have, quite frankly, is the slow timing that it takes to get a new product into the
marketplace. We can change technology in a car from one year to the other.
We now have hundreds of computers on board a vehicle, and yet the test device for which we're measuring
those advanced technologies is actually 45-years-old, and that's really concerning.
So we have to think of a faster way that governments can act, because if the government is not going to mandate it,
then it's not going to happen."