WASHINGTON — Maria Weston Kuhn was on vacation with her family in Maine when a head-on car crash changed her life. Kuhn and her mother, both in the back seat, were rushed to the hospital with serious injuries.
The seatbelt Kuhn wore pinned her intestines to her spine. After emergency surgery and a hospital stay, Kuhn, then 19, had to take a semester off from school to recover. Yet even though her father and brother were closer to the site of impact, they walked away with only scratches.
After Kuhn, who is now 24, returned home from the hospital, she noticed a clipping from Consumer Reports on her bed: Her grandmother had cut out an article about gender disparities in car safety testing. Kuhn learned that her injuries were exactly the kind of injuries women are most likely to suffer in car crashes.
“It’s just like reading your life in a story. It’s crazy,” she told NBC News in an interview last month.
As Kuhn then discovered, women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a head-on car crash compared with men in the same crash. Female drivers and front-seat passengers are 17% more likely to be killed in a car crash than a male occupant of the same age, according to multiple studies conducted over the last five years.
Chris O’Conner, president and CEO of Humanetics, one of the world’s leading producers of crash test dummies, said that’s for a relatively simple and chilling reason: Cars are not designed to be safe for women.
“If you look back in history, the crash test dummy was designed around a male, and that male became the baseline,” O’Conner said, adding that vehicles are being designed “around a male.”
Safety standards today look much like they did in the 1980s, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) first mandated the use of dummies in car safety testing, though there were moves to do more testing with female dummies during the Obama administration. But NHTSA regulations still allow car companies in the U.S. to test for safety using 40- to 50-year-old dummies that are not anatomically representative of the average female, in terms of height, weight and body type — despite newer, more high-tech testing dummies being available.
Today, more women have driver’s licenses than men, and O’Conner argues NHTSA must bolster testing requirements to force American car companies to prioritize safety.
“The car companies aren’t required to test with the new dummy, because the regulation says you only have to use the old standard, which is from 40-50 years ago. So why are the car companies still using this? Because it’s available and it’s easy,” O’Connor said.
The standard “female” car-test dummy in use today weighs 108 pounds and is 4 feet, 11 inches tall. The Hybrid III dummy, created in the 1970s, is based on the smallest 5% of American women and, according to O’Conner, is really just a smaller version of a male-representative dummy with “a chest strapped on to it.”
Humanetics’ newer model, called the THOR-5F, has 150 sensors, including in the legs, where female drivers are at a nearly 80% higher risk for injury than male drivers are in the same accident. The model has also been designed to better mimic an actual female body, according to O’Conner.
“This enables us to be able to design cars that are safer for women as well as safer for men,” O’Conner said.
A Department of Transportation spokesperson said Secretary Sean Duffy’s “top priority” is safety.
“He agrees that new crash test dummies that better cover the only two genders — male or female — have taken too long to develop,” the spokesperson said.
Five and a half years after her accident, Kuhn and her organization, Drive US Forward, are driving forces behind the “She Develops Regulations in Vehicle Equality and Safety (She DRIVES) Act” — a bipartisan bill requiring that NHTSA uses “the most advanced testing devices available” and directing the agency to update federal motor vehicle safety standards.
Duffy’s spokesperson said he “appreciates Congress’s interest in resolving this issue and is committed to accelerating the process to improve safety for all Americans.”
The Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over NHTSA, voted unanimously to advance the bill to the full Senate earlier this year.
“This legislation deals with passenger safety and specifically for women to be safer when they’re traveling in vehicles,” Sen. Deb Fischer, who leads the bill, told NBC News in an interview last month.
“This is truly a safety issue for women. It needs to be addressed,” added Fischer, a Nebraska Republican. “There’s a simple fix, and that fix is to be able to have crash test dummies that reflect a woman’s lighter frame, lesser weight than an average man, and to gather the data from that in order to make these vehicles safer for women to travel in.”
Asked why Congress needs to act to force NHTSA to update safety regulations, she replied: “Sometimes manufacturers need to be pushed a little bit, but I think it always needs to be based on science and facts, and that’s what we have here. We have facts out there that show that there is a problem. It’s a big safety problem, and there’s a simple fix. So let’s do it.”
Since her accident, Kuhn has shared her story with several lawmakers, many of whom support a legislative solution. The She DRIVES Act is “unifying” and “nonpartisan,” Kuhn said.
“With enough determination and commitment, we can come together as Americans to make our country a better place for everyone,” she added.
“It is difficult when you entrust your government to protect you and take care of you, and when they fail to do that, it costs lives,” Kuhn said, adding, “Everybody deserves to feel safe in a car.”
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