STREETSBLOG USA: Advocates Urge Federal Update of Flawed Crash Testing Standards That Discriminate by Sex

Simple reforms to federal testing standards could end horrific disparities in car crash deaths between the sexes — and the impending enactment of the new infrastructure bill is the perfect time to implement them, a new coalition says.

In a letter to US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, advocates from Vehicle Equity Rules in Transportation (also known as Verity Now) urged federal regulators to update Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the New Car Assessment Program to require the use of “biofidelic” crash test dummies that better simulate the effects of vehicle impacts on the bodies of cisgender women and non-binary people who were assigned female at birth. They also want the agency to make a commitment to regularly review those standards and update them as the average height, weight and physiology of the sexes change over time, and to implement the latest crash testing technology as it improves.

Those might seem like small shifts, but the coalition says they could save up to 1,342 lives every single year. Studies show that when they’re inside of a car at the time of a crash, women and people who were assigned female at birth are 17 percent more likely to die and 73 percent more likely to be seriously injured than a driver or passenger who was assigned male at birth who’s struck in the same conditions. That’s thanks, in part, to the fact that most crash test dummies are designed to mimic the body proportions and internal physiology of bodies typically characterized as male — and despite being made aware of the problem decades ago, regulators have failed to update their approach.

“I can just not, for the life of me, believe this is still happening in the United States,” said Susan Molinari, a former member of Congress from New York and Verity Now co-chair. “But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised; women have been left out of all kinds of testing and clinical trials for decades, and this isn’t any different.”

Read full article: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/12/22/advocates-urge-federal-update-of-flawed-crash-testing-standards-that-discriminate-by-gender/