New Ad Campaign Tells NHTSA It Could Learn a Lot From a (Female) Dummy

April 25, 2022 – Washington, DC – Today Verity Now, a coalition advocating for gender equity in car safety, unveiled a new ad campaign targeting NHTSA using the agency’s own iconic PSA campaign to push the agency to finally use female crash test dummies in all New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) testing.

 Vince and Larry, the crash test dummies that headlined dozens of NHTSA’s PSA ads, educated the country about seat belts and car safety from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s. Starting on April 25, 2022, mobile billboards featuring Vince and Larry began circling the US Department of Transportation headquarters and Capitol Hill neighborhood encouraging NHTSA to update its NCAP test.

Today there are more female drivers on the road than men, but more than 40 years after the creation of the first crash test dummy, NHTSA still does not require female dummies in the driver’s seat for all 5-star crash safety tests. When a “female” dummy is used, it is just a scaled down version of the male dummy. It does not account for women’s unique physiology, and this gender discrimination has consequences: In equivalent car crashes, NHTSA’s own research has shown that women are 17% more likely to die and 73% more likely to be severely injured than men.

Susan Molinari, former member of Congress and Verity Now co-chair, said: “NHTSA has known for decades that women are more likely to suffer serious injury and die in comparable crashes compared to men. And yet they continue to refuse to bring equity to car safety standards. It is unacceptable that NHTSA refuses to utilize the same nature and number of tests for women – along with the same quality of testing equipment – that they use for men.”

Beth Brooke, Verity Now co-chair, said: “The Department of Transportation recently released its Equity Action Plan and proposed NCAP revision and failed to take this obvious opportunity to protect women. This issue has been studied for decades without action. It’s well past time for NHTSA to test female dummies so we can improve safety for both women and men.”

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VERITY (Vehicle Equity Rules in Transportation) NOW is a coalition voicing concern about gender inequities in car safety and raising awareness with policymakers who have the power to fix them.