“My name is Vince. This job makes me sore.” “They call me Larry. I’m a dummy, too.” I grew up with Vince and Larry. “Buckle that belt.” The most iconic safety campaign of my childhood. “You go for a ride, put your safety belt on.” It would take me over 20 years to realize that they were missing something. “You could learn a lot from a dummy.” It was Thanksgiving 2024. One moment we were driving to dinner. The next —— “You’re OK.” That’s me being loaded into an ambulance. My boyfriend’s mom was in the hospital for over a month. Me, a broken sternum, a broken clavicle and four broken ribs. The women in the car had more injuries than the men. I never gave it a second thought, but then I talked to my friend David. “Yeah, you told me what happened, and I think I said that makes sense, because women get more hurt in car crashes. And I think I gleaned that from some kind of podcast. And I remember you saying: Wait, what? And then nearly falling out of your chair.” I looked it up, and he was right. Women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured. But it got worse. Turns out the first person ever killed in a crash was a woman. And now they are 17 percent more likely to die compared to men. How could this be possible? The search sent me down the rabbit hole. And what I found was deeply disturbing. It’s a story of how car companies and the government have been ignoring women’s safety for a century. And the consequences have been deadly. I started by researching when cars first became popular in the early 1900s. They were designed by men, for men. “Expressways, turnpikes, parkways.” By the ’50s, the dangers of driving became well known. “More people are killed on the highways than all the U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam.” “Take it easy driving. The life you might save might be mine.” Still, there was little safety testing. Researchers did do some, but they often looked like this. “421 miles per hour.” Yes, that’s a real person. Yet car companies were resistant to safety features like seat belts. “Safety is a dirty word in Detroit.” “You had that piece of spaghetti over your right shoulder, and you had the lap belt. That was very difficult, very difficult.” They blamed the crashes on drivers, not their cars. But in the ’60s, Ralph Nader’s best-selling book exposed car companies’ negligence. “Either it’s sheer callousness or indifference, or they don’t bother to find out how their cars behave.” As a result, a new government agency was formed in 1970. “The agency is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called NHTSA, which polices the safeness of automobiles.” By this point, almost half of the drivers in America are women. But NHTSA made its crash test dummies 5’9” and around 170 pounds, based on the size of the average man at the time. So NHTSA didn’t seem to care about women. I wondered: What about the car companies? “Women. Like they say in the ads, they’ve come a long, long way.” To find out, I read a couple of books on the topic. And turns out they did, kind of. Even though women had been asking car companies for safety features for decades, instead, in the ’50s, they got the pink Dodge La Femme with a matching purse and makeup set. Or in the ’90s, the Ford Probe, which was designed by a woman, but the marketing was, well —— “I refuse to go broke trying to look good.” At first, I figured that’s just how things used to be. But here’s the thing. As early as the ’80s, researchers have been calling for female crash test dummies. But are things better now? I found out that NHTSA didn’t start officially using a female dummy until the early 2000s, more than a decade after we first met. “Now you tell me.” I thought, well, better late than never. It wasn’t. She is 4’ 11” and 108 pounds, roughly the shape and size of a 12-year-old boy’s body. Basically, just a smaller version of the existing male dummy. And it’s still being used today. So NHTSA has been sidelining female dummies for nearly 50 years. I had to ask: Does the shape or the anatomy of the dummy actually matter? Are women’s and men’s bodies really that different? I asked my physical therapist, Dr. Shivana Krishnan, who I saw a few times a week for my injuries. “Of course it matters. So women, on average, have less muscle mass in their neck and upper torso, making them more susceptible than men to upper-body injuries. They are also more susceptible to lower-body injuries because of the differences between the male and female pelvis. So basically, we’re talking about their legs.” Got it. So after this, I thought I had finally found some good news. In 2014, a company called Humanetics started developing a new female crash dummy. I called up their C.E.O., Christopher O’Connor, and asked if I could come see it. Hey, Chris? “Yes?” Yeah, I was wondering if we could come out to the factory and actually see the dummies in real life? Is that OK? “Absolutely. You should come out and visit.” No, that’s not it. That’s Sierra Susie, a dummy from the ’70s that was never used in government crash tests and, for some reason, is wearing a wig and makeup. But anyway, this dummy’s design is based on the actual female body. She’s named Thor-5F, but I call her the loneliest crash test dummy because she’s still waiting to be used in NHTSA’s official crash tests. The government says introducing new dummies requires significant resources. And it’s true, designing anatomically accurate dummies is complicated. Yet as NHTSA delays the implementation of the Thor-5F, it’s closer to introducing a more advanced male dummy. I can’t help but wonder if a female dummy had been used all along, would I have been as injured as I was? Would my boyfriend’s mom’s leg have been broken? And how many of the 10,000 women who die every year from crashes might still be alive? So what can be done about this? A bipartisan group of senators introduced the She DRIVES Act. “That would require NHTSA to update its testing devices for female and male crash test dummies.” It honestly looks like it might pass. So I was like, cool, I can move on with my life, get back to the more important things. But no, because just like the ’50s, the car companies are not having it. Through a lobbying group, many car companies are trying to dilute the She DRIVES Act. They want to prevent the Thor 5-F from being a requirement. Then, at the end of 2025, something surprising happened. “We’re releasing design specifications for this, the first ever advanced female crash test dummy.” The head of NHTSA, Jonathan Morrison, gave his support for the Thor 5-F. “What is this that we’re looking at today?” And if you read the headlines, it seemed like the problem had been solved. But I gave it a closer look. There is no deadline, no tangible action, just good press. If my descent into the rabbit hole has taught me anything, it’s going to take a lot more than that to change the course of women’s car safety. To fix this, Congress needs to pass the She DRIVES Act now and give NHTSA the resources to make this happen. Car companies need to stop lobbying against safety, and NHTSA needs to finally make this a priority. Too many women’s lives are at stake. I know I’m one of the lucky ones. [Engine revs] I get to drive away. But now, when I’m in a car, it’s just a reminder that it wasn’t built for me.
