Rex Kerr
1 min readOct 20, 2023

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Having female crash-test dummies is great, and long long LONG overdue. However, you've included rather out-of-date information for the difference in deaths.

More recent models of vehicles, despite not having ideal crash-test dummies, are considerably safer for everyone and have greatly reduced gender disparity in deaths (~5% now but it varies by age). See: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813358

I don't know how injury stats may have changed, but death at least doesn't seem to be a 17% difference any longer.

Also, you don't mention this but it's worth pointing out that the goal should be to make cars as safe as possible (within the limits that people are willing to tolerate--five-point harnesses help but are a hassle compared to seatbelts and people aren't willing to accept that hassle) for everyone. If this means that women are safer in some ways, or men are safer than some ways, systematically, that's fine! People are saved by absolute safety, not relative safety!

Disparity in injury rates is only bad when there's increased risk due to inattention or lack of care--which right now, given the lack of attention, is likely the case with injury (even though it doesn't really seem to be with death any longer).

Hopefully the new models will result in substantial improvements where these have been overlooked.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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