New Female Crash Test Dummy Aims to Close a Deadly Safety Gap

For nearly a century, cars have been crash‑tested on male bodies, while real women paid the price in shattered bones, brain injuries, and lives cut short. That’s finally starting to change.

For the first time, the federal government has approved a modern crash test dummy based on the female body, a long‑overdue step advocates say could make every family safer on the road.​

“When your body doesn’t count in a crash test, you don’t really count in the safety design,” said Tanya Alsheikh, attorney at the Law Office of Chain | Cohn | Clark. “Women have been 73% more likely to be seriously hurt in head‑on crashes for years, not because they’re weaker, but because the system never designed for them. This new dummy is a promise that our injuries will finally be measured instead of ignored.”​

For decades, U.S. safety standards have relied on “average male” crash test dummies — roughly a 5‑foot‑9, 170‑pound man — as the benchmark for how vehicles perform in a crash. A so‑called “female” dummy was introduced in the early 2000s, but National Public Radio’s reporting makes clear it was little more than a scaled‑down male dummy with breasts, not a true reflection of female anatomy.​ That gap in design has had real consequences:

• Studies show women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a head‑on collision than men in the same crash.​
• Female drivers and front‑seat passengers are 17% more likely to be killed than their male counterparts in the same seating position.​
• A recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) analysis found women have a statistically higher injury risk than men in 26% of 150 different crash‑injury models, and a 46–55% higher injury risk in key frontal crash scenarios.​

Those numbers are not about “bad luck”; they reflect differences in neck structure, pelvis shape, torso mass distribution, and how seatbelts and airbags interact with smaller bodies. Until now, the test tools simply weren’t built to see those risks clearly.​

THOR‑05F Female Crash Test Dummy

In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled the THOR‑05F, the first advanced female crash test dummy designed from the ground up around female anatomy and injury patterns.​ Key features include:

• A body size representing a 5th‑percentile female — roughly a 5‑foot‑tall, 110‑pound woman — who is particularly vulnerable to current restraint systems.​
• Detailed modeling of the neck, collarbone, rib cage, pelvis, and legs to reflect female bone geometry and joint behavior.​
• More than 150 advanced sensors, including in the lower legs and pelvis, areas where women face up to 80% higher injury risk than men in similar crashes.​
• Instrumentation to better measure how seatbelts, airbags, dashboards, and vehicle structures affect smaller, differently proportioned bodies in real‑world crashes.​

Transportation officials say the dummy’s form and crash response are “informed by female anatomy,” allowing far more accurate assessments of injury risk to the brain, chest, abdomen, pelvis, and lower extremities for smaller women.​

Follow‑up reporting explains that THOR‑05F is now moving from blueprint to reality. Humanetics, the Ohio‑based manufacturer that builds crash dummies for the world, is gearing up to produce the new model, with each unit costing well over $1 million and taking months to assemble by hand.​

Approval doesn’t mean THOR‑05F shows up in car commercials tomorrow. The process looks like this:​

• Design and technical specs released: USDOT and NHTSA have published the data manufacturers need to start buying and using the dummy in their own tests.​
• NHTSA in‑house research: The agency is already using the female dummy in its own studies to better understand female injury risk across frontal, side, rear, and rollover crashes.​
• Rulemaking for federal tests: The government must now issue a final rule updating Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) test procedures to formally include THOR‑05F. Current timelines suggest that incorporation into the federal 5‑star safety ratings will begin around 2027–2028.​
• Industry adoption: Automakers can start voluntarily using the dummy now to refine designs before it becomes a regulatory requirement, something safety advocates say responsible manufacturers should do immediately.​

NHTSA’s recent study reaffirming women’s higher injury risk gives added urgency to this timeline, calling the new dummy “long overdue” and critical to closing the remaining gender safety gaps, especially in older and mid‑age vehicles still on the road.​

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For law firms like Chain | Cohn | Clark that represent crash victims, many of them women and girls, the data behind THOR‑05F mirrors what clients have lived through; women suffering serious chest, neck, and leg injuries in crashes where male passengers walked away, smaller drivers “submarining” under lap belts or being hit too hard by airbags designed around a larger male torso, complex, long‑term pain and disability from crashes that insurance companies try to downplay because the vehicles “scored well” on tests that never truly modeled a female body.

The latest federal agency analysis even shows that while newer 2010–2020 vehicles have reduced the fatality gap between men and women — from 18% down to about 6%, and as low as 2.9% in the newest models — women are still at higher risk in far too many configurations. That means design progress has helped, but not solved, the inequity.​

THOR‑05F gives engineers and regulators a better lens. For victims and their attorneys, it also provides powerful, science‑based evidence that injuries suffered by women were predictable and preventable, and that companies had a duty to design and test for them.

While we wait for THOR‑05F to be fully integrated, there are steps women and families can take now:

• Prioritize newer vehicles when possible. NHTSA’s data show the gender safety gap shrinks significantly in vehicles built after 2010, and even more in 2015–2020 models.​
• Adjust seating and restraints carefully. Shorter drivers should sit as far back as safely possible from the steering wheel, keep the seatback upright, and use proper belt positioning (lap belt low over the hips, shoulder belt centered on the chest).
• Insist on advanced safety features. Look for vehicles with good IIHS and NHTSA ratings and modern systems like frontal crash prevention, lane keeping, and side‑impact protection; while not female‑specific, they reduce crash energy overall.
• If you’re injured, don’t let anyone tell you “the car tested fine.” A 5‑star rating based on male‑centered dummies doesn’t mean your injuries are surprising or “minor.” Studies show women’s higher risk is real and systemic.​

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If you or someone you know is injured in an accident at the fault of someone else, or injured on the job no matter whose fault it is, contact the attorneys at Chain | Cohn | Clark by calling (661) 323-4000, or fill out a free consultation form, text, or chat with us at chainlaw.com.