VERITY Now calls on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to protect women’s safety

Washington, DC – VERITY Now, a coalition dedicated to achieving equity in vehicle safety, is urging the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to protect women by requiring that women’s safety is accounted for in vehicle crash tests. In a letter submitted to NHTSA during its public comment period, which closed Tuesday, VERITY Now argues that the agency needs to take stronger action to end the bias against women in crash testing. Current crash tests don’t test for females in all seating positions and use dummies that only reflect “average” men’s bodies or scaled-down versions of men’s bodies, neither of which represent women’s bodies and thus continue to put women at risk every day.

Hundreds of women die, and thousands are seriously injured, every year because the U.S. government doesn’t test for females in all seating positions and has not yet required  available next-generation crash dummies that represent women’s bodies in its tests – only men. This unequal crash test system is hurting women drivers and passengers, and risking their lives. Multiple studies show that death rates for women can range from 9 percent to 28 percent higher than men, and that women are significantly more likely to be injured in a vehicle crash than are men.

VERITY Now believes that NHTSA’s approach to research should be prioritized around equal tests and using the most advanced crash test dummies, which more accurately represent women’s bodies and are currently available for use in testing.  Current 5-star safety ratings exclude women in frontal or side-impact crashes.  This policy must be updated. NHTSA’s policy is so outdated that in tests where the government does mandate testing for women, a scaled-down male dummy is used, which does not account for the biological differences in female bodies or how women are positioned in a vehicle or the location of their hips, abdomens, and breasts. 

A new generation of crash test dummy, the THOR 5F, which has been developed by NHSTA over the past decade, more accurately represents women’s bodies. It is available outside the U.S., but is not yet mandated for use in government tests by NHTSA.

“This is a gender rights issue – a civil rights issue – that needs to be addressed by policymakers.  The Department of Transportation must implement a policy that tests for both women and men equally.  This is a practical, easy step for them to take in their effort to save lives on the road,” said Susan Molinari, co-chair of VERITY Now. “The government has a duty to ensure that there is no gender bias in testing the safety of our vehicles.”

“It is unacceptable for NHTSA to drag their feet on implementing equal tests and lifesaving technologies while others implement solutions,” said VERITY Now co-chair Beth A. Brooke. “They don’t hesitate to recall vehicles off the road when safety is at risk due to faulty airbags, gas tanks, or other dangerous problems. None of these equipment problems caused the amount of harm that unequal crash testing has.”

In the letter, VERITY Now co-chairs Molinari and Brooke state:

“NHTSA’s research plan fails to achieve all it could to fulfill the Agency’s mission – making our roads safer by saving lives and preventing injury – because it fails to hold its research plan accountable by defining proper prioritization and timelines. Any plan that lacks these proactive elements will fail to rid our current system of deadly gender bias and allow this inequality to persist in crash testing.”

VERITY Now also commends NHTSA for its commitment to making vehicles safer and reducing injuries and death resulting from crashes. However, there is serious concern about the pace of implementing updates that would address gender bias in the current testing protocol. 

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About VERITY Now

VERITY (Vehicle Equity Rules in Transportation) Now strives to achieve equity in vehicle safety by educating on, and advocating for, crash testing standards that protect everybody, regardless of gender, height, weight, or age. Inherent biases in crash testing put women, young people, the elderly and heavier body types at significantly higher risk of injury or death in car crashes. This is unacceptable. We need to update vehicle crash testing standards and practices to better understand the safety needs of a broader range of body types.

Technologies exist that can give us a more accurate understanding of how all vehicle occupants are impacted in a crash. These technologies, which employ sensors and other advanced tools, create better data – which can lead to better designs that account for everybody. It is time to deploy these technologies to help save lives. VERITY Now is a group of people who are coming together to voice our concern about these inequities – and talk to policymakers in the U.S. and E.U. who have the power to fix them.