Crash Test Dummies: A Smashing History

He looks like us, he acts like us.

He's a unique feat of engineering.

An unflinching substitute who would take the knocks to literally

save our skins.

We owe him an awful lot.

He has saved countless lives.

It should have a little hall of fame of its own.

And 65 years of being smashed, crashed and impaled has

elevated our unsung hero from understudy to science icon.

It's iconic because people recognise themselves.

It's an incredible success story,

one that brings home the reality of car crashes

and saves lives.

I definitely owe them my life.

This is the story of the crash test dummy.

Crash test dummies or, to give them their proper name,

anthropomorphic test devices.

They are, today, icons for safety - instantly recognisable.

These blank, emotionless faces, with their curious little stickers,

have become the gold standard for crash testing.

But far from being dummies,

these fellas are incredibly sophisticated measuring instruments,

a finely and precisely calibrated combination of science, technology,

engineering and mathematics, capable of recording

tens of thousands of data points in milliseconds.

In 2009, the legacy of the crash test dummy was celebrated

in an extraordinary collision between the past and the present.

Two dummies met head-on in cars

separated by 50 years of crash test research.

The classic '59 Bel Air had no safety features.

Here, the dummy was unrestrained and vulnerable.

In contrast, the 2009 Malibu bristled with modern safety devices,

all perfected with the help of the dummy at its wheel.

No seatbelts, no collapsible steering wheel, no airbags -

common occurrence in the '50s and '60s before safety standards

started affecting the design of vehicles.

The dummy in the Bel Air was crushed as the car collapsed around him.

You can see that the steering wheel comes straight

back into the face of the crash test dummy.

While the dummy in the Malibu was kept safe by its multiple

modern safety features.

We've got extra-high-strength steel in an occupant compartment structure,

we've got crumple zones that are designed to crumple,

we've got seatbelts and airbags doing a co-ordinated job.

What the Malibu does is remarkable.

In less than a blink of an eye, it deploys a life-saving airbag,

pre-tensions the seat belts

and crumples just enough to absorb the energy and protect the occupant.

It's a triumph of design that is, quite literally, a lifesaver.

A driver in this test would die.

Whereas that person probably could walk away from the crash.

The crash test dummy is an incredible success story,

and his statistics speak for themselves.

In 1960, nearly 7,000 people died on UK roads.

But despite a tenfold increase in car numbers, by 2012,

road deaths were down to 1,900.

That's just four deaths for every billion miles travelled.

So I want to discover just how the dummy has helped

turn our cars from deadly...

..to safe...

..and understand just how his evolution has driven

the development of car safety systems.

But our story begins not with car safety

but in the post-war boom of the aerospace industry...

..where the very first crash test dummy

was not made of rubber and steel but flesh and bone.

As men looked to fly faster and higher, they were exposed to greater

and greater G-forces, both in flight and in the event of a crash.

The problem was no-one knew what the human body could withstand.

Enter Colonel John Stapp, a US Air Force doctor

and human crash test dummy.

According to most sources, anything above 18G,

or 18 times the force of gravity, would prove fatal.

But Stapp questioned this conventional wisdom.

And to prove his point, he went and strapped himself to a rocket.

Over the next eight years,

he exposed himself to a series of increasingly extreme tests

until, on December 10 1954, Stapp became

not only the fastest man on earth,

but also, the fastest-stopping, too...

..as after accelerating to 632 miles an hour,

his rocket sled hit the world's most sophisticated water brake.

It came to a complete stop in 1.1 seconds.

Stapp experienced 46.2G,

the equivalent of a car hitting a wall at 120 miles an hour...

..bursting nearly every capillary in his eyeballs.

He was left temporarily blind, heavily bruised but alive.

Colonel Stapp gave us an important starting point,

and from then on, people can look at

our biomechanical response to impacts

and exactly what we can tolerate.

Colonel Stapp was instrumental in making fast jets safer.

In fact, they got so safe,

he noticed that the US Air Force were, ironically enough,

losing more men to car crashes than they were to planes.

He then quickly realised his sled work could be adapted for use

in the growing debate over seatbelts in the car industry.

The problem was Stapp had finally reached his personal limit

and other human volunteers were few and far between.

So, with crude dummies already in military use, in 1956,

Stapp conscripted one of these into the domestic car industry.

He was called Sierra Sam.

Born in 1949, he was named after the Sierra Engineering company

who built him.

Weighing in at 200lbs, he stood upright at 5 foot 10 inches.

Built of steel and rubber,

he was originally modelled on real US Air Force pilots.

They were simply a dummy with movable joints, movable limbs.

They were the right height and the right weight

so they may be dropped out of an aeroplane with a parachute,

and the goal of the test was to see if the parachute opened

and maybe see if there were any broken parts on the dummy.

While Sierra Sam had made pilots' lives safer,

his use in the car industry was limited.

Although the sight of him ejecting from a car crashing

provided shocking visual data.

His crudely jointed limbs meant he didn't sit in the car like we do.

And his inaccurate weight distribution meant

when the car crashed, he didn't act like a human occupant.

This lack of human-like responses

meant his so-called biofidelity was low.

Crash dummies need to be designed

so they behave the way a human would behave.

As an example, the ribs of a crash dummy are designed

so they compress the same amount as a human ribcage would compress.

The difference is, the dummy's ribs were designed not to break -

instead we measure injury risk in that crash test.

Although he didn't make the grade,

Sierra Sam is considered the grandfather of all modern dummies,

providing the inspiration upon which later dummies were built,

as they set out on a quest for greater, more improved biofidelity.

As our amount of biomechanical data improves,

our knowledge of what happens in real world accidents improves.

These actually get reflected back into the dummies.

Injuries occur in a crash

when the occupant is brought to a very sudden, very painful stop.

The accelerations you experience is very high.

Which means the forces going through your bones, your muscles, your body

are very, very high, and they start to tear those things apart.

It was dummies like Sierra Sam that enabled engineers to perfect

a method for reducing these forces.

By making the car sacrifice itself, the crash time is lengthened,

allowing the occupants to come to a slower, less painful stop.

First introduced in the '50s, it's known as the survival cell.

The front and rear of the car is allowed to crumple,

while the occupant compartment is reinforced.

The more the vehicle crushes, the longer it takes to slow down.

The longer it takes to slow down,

the longer you get to slow down, thereby reducing the forces.

It's a very effective innovation.

Although, get it wrong, and the results can be fatal.

This design got it backwards.

The front end here is stiffer than the parts behind it,

so what crushed, instead of the front,

was the back, which is where the dummy...

where you would be sitting.

Today, the survival cell is the cornerstone of car safety design...

..extending beyond the road car into the high-octane world of motorsport.

Here, specially-modified crash test dummies have helped perfect

the race car monocoque, which has allowed drivers to survive

some of the highest-speed crashes imaginable.

In 1996, IndyCar and F1 driver Mark Blundell

tested the concept to the limit.

Coming down the back straight, I think we were touching 202mph.

ENGINES REV

Hit the brake pedal...

and one of a racing driver's worst fears is no brakes.

I basically took the decision that what I needed to do was to hit

the car in front of me before I hit the concrete wall.

Because I knew at that speed,

hitting concrete, the chances of me surviving were slim.

I wanted to hit him to take away the impact

and anticipate some of the energy.

And probably luckily for him, I did miss him.

'And, oh! Against the wall!

'That looks like Mark Blundell.'

I hit at 198 miles an hour...

About a 122G impact.

HE SIGHS

The car does everything it's designed to do,

the engine breaks away from the monocoque,

the front of the monocoque was damaged,

but that's what broke my impact.

'That disintegration is good. That's energy leaving the car.'

My seatbelts were five inches longer than what they were manufactured.

So that tells you that my body went forward in such a way,

they stretched five inches.

The monocoque of that race car was two inches narrower

than what it was manufactured.

Mark Blundell climbed out of the car under his own power,

but seemed to collapse by the edge of the track.

Four fractures in my right foot, my knees were like basketballs.

My internal organs had moved

so the cartilage muscle was stripped off the sternum.

And my lungs and ribs had collided.

I'd hit my head against the steering wheel

and also against the side of the wall.

And I had a haematoma, so I had a blood clot on the brain.

Lucky boy...really.

Mark's car exceeded its design criteria,

safely cocooning him in a survival cell.

But, as his injuries demonstrate,

just preventing the driver from being crushed

isn't the end of the problem...

..as, even after a car has stopped moving,

the occupants are still travelling at the same speed.

Here, they're about to have not one, but two further crashes.

Firstly, they hit anything inside the car,

such as the steering wheel or windshield.

Then, the final crash takes place inside the body.

We, as doctors, work on this principle

of three crashes in the one accident.

Inside the body, the organs are still moving, so the third and final crash

is when those internal organs impact on the inside of the chest.

In the case of the head,

it might be the brain tissue itself coming into contact with the skull.

This internal collision can cause as serious injuries

as any direct impact.

Collapsed lungs, ruptured arteries and brain haemorrhages

are among the most common suffered in car crashes.

By the 1960s, road deaths were continuing to rise.

Cars still had hard, metal interiors and very few had any restraints.

The next challenge for engineers was to find an efficient way

to keep the occupants safe inside the car.

What the restraint system has to do is actually to absorb

the kinetic energy of the person inside the car,

keeping his accelerations level down as low as possible.

In the US, celebrated political activist Ralph Nader

published his damning book about the American car industry.

Unsafe At Any Speed had revealed

many US cars were dangerous to operate.

Action was needed.

Crude dummies like Sierra Sam had already proved

that lap belts usually did more harm than good.

But to develop a safe, three-point system,

a more human-like dummy was called for.

The geometry of a seatbelt system is important.

The routing of the belts are important.

The lap belt has to ride low so you interact with your pelvic bone,

so your pelvic bone helps to slow you down in a crash.

In a similar fashion, the shoulder belt really should interact

with your sternum and not your neck, or not your abdomen.

So as the cool cats of the '60s turned on, tuned in and dropped out,

the first true automotive dummy

got wired in, smartened up and sat down.

The VIP, or Very Important Person dummy proved to be a revolution.

At 170lbs, he was Mr Average.

His improved weight distribution, articulated joints

and a realistic pelvic structure meant, for the first time,

he sat in a lifelike driving position.

Added instrumentation now gave engineers valuable data

so they could develop the three-point seatbelt.

He was a success, and soon became part of the establishment

as the first dummy written into US car safety legislation.

But while the VIP had very good biofidelity,

he lacked two important qualities - repeatability and reproducibility.

Repeatable means the same dummy behaves the same way

from one day to the next.

Reproducible means a similar dummy of the same design

has got to behave the same way.

Car safety was now a high-stakes enterprise.

All the manufacturers needed a dummy who could be relied on

to perform consistently.

As you design a motor vehicle, you need to run multiple crash tests.

So you may run a crash test

and record his injury measurements,

make some changes.

And then run another crash test.

The crash dummy has to be repeatable.

We can't have variations in the crash dummy.

That would mask any improvements, or changes, in the restraint system.

Today, modern dummies endure five to ten crashes

before they need a complete overhaul and recalibration.

And they may experience over 1,000 crashes in a lifetime.

Unfortunately the '60s VIP was a free spirit.

His lack of repeatability meant manufacturers now challenged

crash test results in the courts.

And before long it was RIP to the VIP.

The controversy over the VIP dummy had shown manufacturers

that they needed to come together

to produce a new global standard in dummy design.

Calibration and repeatability were key to these aims.

We had to go and get all these different designs assessed,

put together into that one dummy

and that is why it's called the Hybrid dummy.

In 1971, along with glam rockers and punk shockers,

came a new dynasty of rubber crash-stoppers.

General Motors had forged a successful marriage

between the Sierra and VIP dummies.

The result was the father of the modern dummy, the Hybrid I.

His improved joint articulation and weight distribution

meant he was more humanlike than any previous dummy.

This is the Hybrid frontal impact crash dummy.

He is a little bit more sophisticated than the Sierra dummy.

You start to see a little bit better shape of his body.

This dummy did have some instrumentation in the head

and chest cavity, but it needed to be revised some more.

So by 1973, the Hybrid II was the new kid on the block.

Now with improved crash responses in his shoulder, spine and knee,

he sat at the forefront of safety development for the next five years.

Until, in 1977, 30 years of dummy evolution

produced the current industry standard.

FANFARE OF TRUMPETS

And here he is.

The Hybrid III anthropomorphic test device.

What makes him king is his greatly improved spine

and neck articulation.

He now closely mimics the human body during a crash.

Fully loaded with instrumentation in his head, rib cage and femur,

he records unprecedented data.

But the Hybrid III has stamina as well as brains.

He comes complete with an array of calibration tests.

These ensure he provides reliable data, crash...

..after crash,

after crash.

I want to discover what makes the Hybrid III

the frontal crash test dummy of choice over 30 years on.

To find out, I've come here to MIRA,

the renowned automotive research centre,

where I should be able to really get under the skin

of a crash test dummy.

Three, two, one,

and release.

Welcome to our dummy certification lab.

Let me please introduce you to one of our Hybrid III crash test dummies.

Dr Tony Payne is MIRA's dummy guru.

The important thing is we are looking at those parts of the body

which are likely to cause life-threatening injuries.

'First, off with his head!

'Which is fitting, as the head and neck of the most vulnerable parts

'of the body.'

There we are. There's the pin.

Now we can actually take the head off the top of the neck.

There you are.

4.5 kilograms of dummy head.

You wouldn't have thought it, would you?

There's a lot of mass there which, there, you then see instantly

why the neck's so vulnerable.

'This six-axis load cell records the forces exerted

'at the very top of the neck.'

In a typical 30mph crash,

the head can experience an acceleration of up to 35G.

And are the loads measured at this specific point

-because that is the most vulnerable part of the skeleton?

-That's right.

If you actually dislocate the spine there,

or fracture the vertebrae, there's a limited chance of survivability.

-Obviously, within your head you've got an extremely precious item.

-Yes.

Your brain. I guess, in here, we find the brain cavity.

Exactly.

'Instead of a brain, the dummy is equipped with accelerometers

'which record what happens to the brain during a crash.'

When you put the grey matter under high accelerations,

you actually rupture the blood vessels on the surface of the brain,

or the neurons within it. The other severe problem you've got is

where the brain itself separates from the inside of the skull.

That causes a severe amount of haemorrhaging into the brain cavity

and can lead to a fatality.

When I first come in and I look at the dummies, I think,

"Oh, great, it's a crash test dummy."

Then when you put into context what their job is,

it all becomes a bit more stark.

If we drop that down there through the pins... There we go.

There's the arms.

The arm is actually uninstrumented

because injuries to the arm

are not life-threatening. There we are.

That's the jacket.

'The chest is another highly vulnerable area,

'so the dummies have this realistic ribcage.

'It's designed to measure impacts and crushing forces

'that could crack or break the ribs.'

The human body can withstand one cracked rib without serious injury.

It's when you have multiple cracked ribs,

in fact, we have a problem then with the integrity

of the chest cavity itself and difficulty in breathing.

OK. It's...

It's all very real when put in those terms.

You realise that these dummies...

They do a very important job that no person could do.

Just get its stomach out.

Oh, so there we go, I've got its stomach out.

Oh, there we go.

'Our dummy dissection is almost complete.

'And the final life-threatening zone is the upper leg.'

I was under the impression that your thigh bone, your femur,

was the biggest, strongest bone in your body.

Why is that, then, such a vulnerable area?

What happens in an accident is the whole body actually moves forward

and the knee makes contact

with the lower part of the instrumentation panels.

This femur will not just actually go and break,

you could actually shatter them.

That shattering may actually rupture your femoral artery,

causing considerable haemorrhaging.

The way you put it sounds very technical and medical,

but the bottom line is that there is the potential there to shatter

your thigh bone and then bleed to death.

Yes, it's a life-threatening injury.

There we are.

Now, the most striking thing about taking apart a crash test dummy

is realising how vital all the components are,

and the job they do,

but also the vulnerability of certain parts of the body

and, as Tony has described,

the mechanism of potentially fatal injury.

You realise that there is simply no substitute

for a well-made anthropomorphic test device.

The Hybrid III's modular robust design

is the key to his success.

Soon he was the global standard, helping manufacturers

perfect their restraint systems.

But, with the travelling public coming in all shapes and sizes,

it became obvious one size didn't fit all.

The critical point is that people sit differently in cars.

The larger person will tend to sit further back in the seat

and the smaller person will tend to sit further forward in the seat,

and we have to reflect this in the crash test as well.

So in the late '80s the Hybrid III started a family.

First he got a bigger brother.

Then a diminutive wife, Ms Hybrid,

who, at 108lb, weighed more than just 5% of the population.

Then came the kids, ages ten, six, three and a newborn.

While they didn't yet accurately reflect the weight distribution

of real children, for the first time risks to the whole family

could be graphically demonstrated.

Accidents you dread most... Children, obviously.

Children being involved in road traffic accidents

are, without doubt, the worst type of road traffic accident.

Just by virtue of the emotion and the futility of it all.

The tragic nature of accidents involving children

is the primary driver in the development of both

child restraint systems and more sophisticated child dummies.

It's a problem all car manufacturers take seriously.

It was the Swedish giants, Volvo, who were the first in the world

to trial a rear-facing child seat in 1964.

Here at their Gothenburg HQ,

'I've come to meet up with the very latest generation of child dummies.

'Lotta Jakobssen is their child safety specialist.

'She's going to show me how these new "Q" dummies

'have helped tackle the dangers of transporting very young children.'

Smaller children, their heads

are relatively less well supported for their mass.

Yes, absolutely, the head is proportionally heavy

and the neck is really not developed yet.

It's not strong.

The muscles are really... not really developed

and it means that, in case of the head going forward

and the body stays in position, shearing is more likely to occur.

As a consequence, even a relatively low-speed crash can cause

serious injuries to a forward-facing child.

Repeated dummy tests have shown that children under four

are five times safer if they travel in rear-facing car seats.

This is the only way we can fix it

because simply the head is too heavy and the neck is too weak.

I take it this is for...

'Even once the kids grow up, the older child dummies

'play a vital role in making sure the forward seat

'properly restrains the child.'

Oh, sorry.

Oh, well, he doesn't feel much pain.

The routing of the seatbelt is critical.

For the larger dummies, you need to measure some particular things.

Head injuries, chest injuries...

If you're not in a booster seat, having the lap belt

over your thighs, you are very likely to sustain

an internal organ injury in the lower abdominal region.

I think it's interesting how the evolution of dummies

and the evolution of car safety technology go hand-in-hand.

-You need one to validate the next.

-Absolutely.

I mean, really the dummies are our substitutes

because we can get a lot of information from real world crashes,

where humans are involved,

but you can never do development based on that

if you don't have any tool to check it in the laboratory environment.

That's why they have a very important purpose.

It's a cruel irony that child dummy development has progressed this far

because of real world incidents.

Yet, encouragingly, these little guys are making a real

difference in making the whole family's travelling life safer.

But, no crash test family would be complete

without a dummy's best friend, the crash test dog.

And while he may look cute, he serves as a sober reminder

that unrestrained, even a small dog can become a deadly missile.

Today crash labs all over the world rely

on their families of Hybrid III dummies

to provide accurate, verifiable data.

This is the Insurance Institute Of Highway Safety

in Ruckersville, Virginia.

Inside this 22,000 square foot testing facility,

they've been deliberately crashing cars since 1959.

We do a number of different kinds of tests.

We do frontal crash tests, where the front of the vehicle gets damaged.

We do side tests, where we crash something

into the side of a vehicle.

We do tests that simulate what happens when your car

is struck from the rear.

The Institute's engineers are preparing for a new

and difficult test called the frontal small overlap.

Just 20% of the driver's side of the car will impact

the concrete barrier at 40 miles an hour.

It's a frontal crash that almost didn't happen

because one or the other driver will try to take an evasive manoeuvre.

But if that evasive manoeuvre is too late, or not enough,

the crash happens anyway.

When the crash happens anyway, you end up with all of the force

going into a small part of the front structure of the vehicle,

and if that isn't designed to deal with that force...

then you start seeing the effects of that force

back in the area where people are sitting.

Taking knocks today is this Hybrid III frontal crash dummy.

The question is, will he survive?

The dummy is the reason we do this.

We don't care so much what a vehicle does,

as long as the person in the vehicle survives the crash.

Engineering technician Tyler Ayres

make sure our dummy is seated in exactly the right position.

See, the non-sticky side is to the wheel.

We just tape the fingers to each other so he won't let go.

But the steering wheel can still move freely going down the runway.

A crash test is a scientific experiment,

and one of the things that we want to be able to do

is have the experiment done in this laboratory,

be repeatable at other laboratories.

Centre...

One and two.

Centre.

I'm looking about point two. Yeah, point two.

There you go.

If we did the crashes willy-nilly,

then the results that we see would be a result of variation

in the tests themselves, as opposed to variations in the vehicle designs.

264.

264.

372.

372.

Our dummy will transmit over 30 channels of data

to computers secured in the car...

..creating over 30,000 data points from his key life-threatening zones.

We will receive accelerations in his head,

bending forces of his neck fore and aft, left and right.

Chest compression, forces into his hip...

leg loads, upper, lower knee.

A tenth of a second, we get all of that.

A tenth of a second is ten days of work.

Our dummy's survival

is partly dependent on how well the car's airbags perform.

Today, airbags are fitted as standard to all cars,

acting as a supplemental restraint system to the seat belt.

First fitted to US cars in the early '70s,

they began appearing in the UK from 1980.

They pull off an incredible feat...

..inflating and then beginning to deflate before the occupant hits it.

In a crash, this all takes place in less than two tenths of a second.

This car has multiple airbags in the steering wheel,

door and even the foot well.

This low-tech solution will reveal

how well they protect our dummy during the crash.

This gives us a good idea,

if they don't capture it on camera where the head makes contact,

because it tends to go in-between the frontal airbag and the side curtain.

Anything it hits. We can see if the head hits the back of the hand,

if the hand hits something.

Just transfers really well and shows us all contact points.

OK, Bob.

Everything is now set.

19 high-speed cameras will capture the crash

at 500 frames per second.

Ten days of planning and preparation will be over in a split second.

Only then will the engineers know if our dummy has survived.

Set message received.

Set received. I'm making sure that my connectivity stays up.

It's the only thing I'll look at now. The dummy's set.

Nothing I can do about him.

Three, two, one, zero.

As the team move in to clear the debris,

Sean is able to make his initial crash investigation.

He first needs to establish how much contact

the dummy has made with the inside of the car.

Right now it's somewhat evident... the head, initially,

engaged the frontal airbag and then slid off

towards the dashboard, off to the left side.

It doesn't look like there is any head contact.

That's the main driver of surviving a crash, is your head.

The impact has deformed the driver's door, trapping the dummy inside.

It's also bent the steering column,

shifting the steering wheel airbag out of position...

..a common problem with this type of crash.

He contacts the bag and then he slides off the bag

because the steering wheel goes right, you go left,

it doesn't, it's not a good marriage.

Luckily there's no sign of any serious head impact.

It looks like right now his head didn't contact

any hard part of the interior.

He did contact his hand, which then contacted the dashboard

so it was kind of a double-hand dashboard hit.

The injury risk is pretty low for the head on this test right now.

Although our dummy has not escaped without damage.

I'm just checking to see if the foot was trapped.

It's not, it's loose in here.

As the front wheel hit the barrier,

it collapsed into the driver's foot well, crushing his leg.

You can see the dashboard here pushed into his leg and it's pretty tight.

Our dummy's internal data shows the leg injuries would be severe

but not life-threatening.

We would have a very sore, if not broken, left leg

and a possible headache.

Other than that, you're alive.

It's been a good day's work for our dummy,

proving that despite this car having good crashworthiness,

this new test is particularly challenging.

The leg-crushing injuries were so severe that it was eventually

awarded the institute's lowest rating of poor.

Proof that even for the safest cars today,

there is still room for improvement.

But not all crashes are frontal.

Some of the most life-threatening are side impacts.

Here, occupants of the car that is struck

often receive fatal head injuries.

This test graphically shows the problem.

Right here in the hood of the Ford Explorer is a dent

made by the crash test dummy's head.

The crush zone in the side of the car is about that wide,

versus a metre or more at the front of the car.

So it's a trickier job to provide the same

level of protection in the side as it is the front,

simply because the safety engineer has less to work with.

The problem of side impacts was deemed serious enough

to require its own dummy.

SID, or the Side Impact Dummy, is a close cousin of the Hybrid II.

He was first conceived in the early '80s.

Since then continuous refinement has developed dummies that accurately

measure the lateral forces exerted on the ribs and pelvis.

The injuries we see in side impact

are subtly different to the injuries we get in frontal impact,

and therefore we need to have a specific dummy

to actually go and replicate those injuries.

SID helped develop the inflatable side airbag.

It's an ingenious solution that evenly distributes

and dissipates the violent forces involved in a side impact.

They have had a dramatic effect on reducing injuries.

Simply fitting those inflatable curtains

and airbags to protect the head reduces the likelihood that

people die in fatal crashes by about 40%.

Anna Drysdale and Colleen Tebble owe their lives to the SID dummy.

I actually remember thinking, "This is it.

"This... This is just how it's going to end."

In June 2009, Anna lost control of her car at 60mph.

I can just remember the sensation of, like, the spin

and just being flung around... and the noise, it was really loud.

It left the road and had a violent side impact with a tree.

The impact and the stop is almost non-describable

because it's so sudden and is so shocking.

This huge, violent crash and then all of a sudden it's deathly silent.

Colleen escaped relatively unscathed,

but Anna had a broken femur.

It was just one of her multiple injuries.

Severe lacerations to my right arm, lacerations to my head,

I'd broken my thighbone...

I was in hospital for six days and I was in a wheelchair for 12 weeks.

Nevertheless, she simply wouldn't have survived

were it not for the side airbag that the SID dummy helped to perfect.

I actually went to see the car when I was still on crutches.

The person who brought the car over said,

"I gather you were in this crash," and I said "Yes, I was the driver."

And he went very pale, and that really, really shocked me, and it was

like, "Wow, if you didn't think I'd be able to get out of this, then...

"I'm very lucky to be here."

I owe my life to the crash test dummies and airbags

and car safety, and that's without a doubt,

because I could have very easily have been taken anyway in a body bag.

Most of today's dummies are designed to collect data on

life-or-death injuries, but of course there are many less serious

injuries that can blight an accident victim's life.

Here at the Motor Industry Research Centre in Thatcham,

they have a specifically designed dummy to test for potential injury

that, at the very least, could be a pain in the neck.

Whiplash is an injury to the neck which is caused

when a patient decelerates quickly.

The body is restrained, the head continues moving

and the neck flexes.

The worse that flexion is,

the worse the whiplash is.

In the extreme version of that, the patient may actually break

the bones in the neck.

Whiplash can occur in any accident,

but is most common in a low-speed rear-impact collision.

This is the biofidelic rear impact dummy,

or BIOrid to his friends.

He has this incredibly realistic neck and spinal structure

that is the closest yet to mimicking our own.

-Hi there, Ian, Rhys.

-Hi, Jem, how's it going?

'Today we will be testing an extreme scenario -

'a 30mph rear impact with a standard seat

'with limited whiplash protection.

'Ian Dudman is the lead engineer.'

Yeah, this particular test

that we are going to do today is 7.5G.

7.5G?

So if there's a fairly hefty 80kg person in there,

that's nearly 600 kilos during a crash

that's shunting back in the seat.

Yeah, and this seat's got to be able to absorb that energy

and control it as well.

If your car suddenly gets shunted forwards, unless something

is bringing your head with it, your head effectively gets left behind.

Your body gets pushed forward by the seat, by the back of the seat

but without that rest, straight back.

That's correct, yes. JEM WHISTLES

A seat that performs well will catch the dummy's head,

gently bringing it forward with the car.

Whereas a poor-performing seat will allow the head to ride up

over the head restraint.

This will cause painful

and potentially dangerous hyperextension of the neck.

With the BIOrid's neck and spine mimicking our own,

he records the precise amount of hyperextension

and can determine the level of injury.

Just pull him nice and gently.

Once in the seat,

we have to align the pelvis to a precise angle.

OK.

And we've got the tilt sensors there, so they need all to be green.

So if you grab hold of his pelvis angle gauge...

It requires a bit of, well... manhandling.

OK, almost there. Little bit of a push down...

Bit more...

It's less easy than you think. Oh, God!

Oh, I've moved him totally wrongly now.

-It's a bit like the Generation Game.

-It is a bit!

I never saw this version.

If only I'd known that technique.

In a real-world situation it's like a stationary car being hit

by a very similar moving car at 30mph.

So imagine that, you've stopped there at the traffic lights,

something piles straight into the back of you at 30mph.

That's the kind of effect that you're going to see down there.

My suspicion is it's not going to look pretty.

Testing.

Three, two, one...

Ohhh!

MECHANISM HISSES

I didn't think it was going to be quite that harsh.

It just piled through the back of the seat. I...

HE GASPS

And when you look at the slow motion...

The seat deforms, the head then rides up over the head restraint

and the neck comes right back in a kind of hyperextension.

You can see why that seat head restraint is so vastly important.

The movement on the neck is just wrong.

Examining the seat,

it's clear the dummy would have suffered severe injuries.

The dummy has seen hyperextension, as the head did go clearly

right round the top of the head restraint.

And you can see the marks here in the silver tape where the vertebrae

have actually dug into the silver tape

instead of the back of the head being supported really nicely

in the centre of the head restraint.

This was an extreme case,

but thousands of similar tests like this on a whole range of

car seats have informed manufacturers

how to build safer seats.

It's vital research, as whiplash, even in its mild form,

is a debilitating injury that is difficult to diagnose.

It often causes misery to sufferers

and costs insurers over £2 billion a year.

Without the BIOrid dummy, this toll would be far greater.

The Hybrid III, in all its various forms, has been

the dummy of choice for nearly 30 years

but, like every great champion,

there is always a young pretender waiting in the wings.

And in the dummy world the new kid on the block is called Thor,

and with his impressive array of technology,

it really does look likely he will become the new god of safety.

THUNDERCLAP

So here it is, the Test Device For Human Occupant Restraint,

or Thor for short.

And with a name like that it's only fitting

I'd have to come to Sweden to find him.

When you're out driving, you shouldn't be hurt,

you should be safe.

And what we've been trying to do for the past 100 years

is making sure that that's what happens.

We're getting better and better at it.

Volvo's Gothenburg HQ boasts the largest

and most advanced crash lab in the world.

Here, every type of real-world crash scenario

is recreated as they search for the Holy Grail of the crash-proof car.

Central to this development is Thor,

their new half-a-million-pound super-dummy.

He represents the cutting edge in terms of biofidelic features

and sensor technology.

One major innovation is his highly manoeuvrable clavicle

that closely mimics the human shoulder.

The shape, but also the big flexibility.

-Because that's what we are.

-Yeah.

We could see from the real world that we actually had

head impacts in areas where the Hybrid III didn't even reach to.

-Right.

-So that...

-That flexibility...

That's made us develop this shoulder and it works nice.

Thor's biggest innovation is that he provides information on areas

previously unmonitored by the Hybrid III.

Sensors in his arms, abdomen and even in his featureless face

can now provide data on non-life-threatening injuries.

Biofidelically, he is the closest thing to a human being

from head to toe.

You can see that that's a world of difference.

-It's almost just a single hinge.

-It IS a single hinge.

I mean, the Hybrid III has a ball joint

and that's not what we look like.

We have a different point of rotation for twisting

and for flexing.

And I guess in ankle injuries again you wouldn't necessarily

put them down as life-threatening, but there's been a lot of work

gone into establishing what happens with the ankles.

Ankle injuries can give long-term consequences

because of its complexity in the joint.

Also because of load transfer.

So that we have the correct load transfer for the Thor dummy.

And it's the subtleties that make such a huge difference

because one big feature of a human being, everything is connected.

-Absolutely.

-One thing gets knocked and it has an impact...

-Exactly.

In order to develop a protection system that actually

addresses real humans in a good way, you have to have as humanlike

behaviour of the crash test dummy as possible.

And still we have to remember

that this is primarily our measurement tool,

that needs to be repeatable, perform the same way every time.

So, yes, that's the challenge here,

to make it as sophisticated

and biofidelic as possible but still being very repeatable.

-That's the challenge for engineers.

-That is the challenge.

-That's what we do.

Thor completes a line of selfless, unquestioning dummies,

tireless in their pursuit of safety.

Each one more sophisticated, more biofidelic,

more robust than the last.

Men, women, children,

even dogs...

they all remain icons of safety.

But what of the future?

Can the crash test dummy survive?

Or is the computer about to take over?

With the next safety innovations geared towards preventing

the crash in the first place, engineers like Volvo's

Mickael Ljungaust will need help from a virtual crash test dummy.

If you're not looking at the road,

and there's a car suddenly braking in front of you,

the car will tell you and ask you to look at the road again,

so you can brake. If you don't, the car might brake for you.

So what we're doing now is really trying to develop

kind of the equivalent of a crash test dummy.

We need a crash test mind, if you will.

But it's a long journey and we'd prefer to stay on the safe side,

so we'll keep our dummies employed for the foreseeable future.

The crash test dummy, a unique feat of engineering.

It's a highly evolved, superhumanly strong...life-saver,

who, for over 65 years, has played a part in all our lives.

I think there's a great history to them

and I think there's also a great future to them as well.

All of us owe a debt of gratitude to our family of crash dummies

who have really taken a hit in these crash tests.

Simply put, there are many, many people walking around today

that owe their lives to crash test dummies.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd