A Crash Test can only be Complete once they do This

When you see advertisements by companies like Saab or Volvo that focus on how safe their cars are, they often show you elaborate videos of their crash test methods - to win your confidence. And those videos inevitably show you how they test those cars with crash test dummies. Is that how it is really done? If you have always suspected that there has to be more to these crash tests than merely the use of dummies, you could be onto something.

The thing is, as advanced as the understanding of the safety departments of the auto companies is of how they must interpret the things that happened to crash test dummies, their understanding isn't perfect. They can never know how exactly the safety features on their cars can translate into real world results until they use actual humans strapped to those seats. Every car company has to do this; the question is, how.

The answer is that they use cadavers. When generous-minded people leave their body to science, many of those bodies end up strapped to car seats in a crash test. And it's been this way for close to 80 years now. They use cadavers to test the safety of air bags, the safety of a steering column design, the safety of a laminated windshield and everything else. How about the 2011 Ford Explorer that has inflatable rear seatbelts? Ford keeps advertising this safety feature these days; it's a design that would not have been possible if it were not for how they tested with human cadavers. So what do the big car companies actually do? Do they order dead bodies, and then hand them over to their engineers? Not exactly. Those engineers really don't have the expertise needed to handle cadaver crash tests properly. Instead, they farm this work out to the universities that do have the required expertise.

Whatever test results come out of universities, all car manufacturers tap into them. For instance, with the inflatable seatbelts idea that Ford had, they really had no idea how it would work in real life to have seatbelts that could inflate in a flash. What would happen for instance, if there was a child with those seatbelts on? They needed to know exactly what it would do to the internal organs of a human to have seatbelts explode into a balloon all of a sudden. They had a cadaver crash test test done for them, and the results were encouraging enough that the device was offered on an actual car this year.

If you think about it, this isn't just some commercial thing that those cadavers are used for. Experts estimate that the advances made in the vehicle crash safety through testing with cadavers has saved about 10,000 lives so far. What could be better science?