Kate Hippler adjusts a THOR-5F female crash test dummy in a vehicle at Humanetics in Farmington Hills, Mich., Tuesday, June 10, 2025. Paul Sancya/AP
When the Trump administration announced it was giving the green light to the design for a female crash test dummy, advocates who have pushed for better female representation in vehicle safety welcomed the news.
This dummy has been on a long journey. And she’s not at the end of the road yet.
Vehicle safety tests in the U.S. have long relied on crash test dummies based on a male body. Advocates say it’s no coincidence that women are more likely to suffer injuries in car crashes than men, even after accounting for crash severity and vehicle size.
Calls for an accurate female crash test dummy date back decades; Consumer Reports traces them to 1980. In the early 2000s regulators added a small “female” dummy to tests, but it was simply a scaled-down male model with breasts attached — a poor reflection of true anatomical differences.
Around the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began working on a more accurate female dummy. For more than a decade NHTSA and Humanetics, the leading manufacturer of crash test dummies, have collaborated to develop, build and test the design unveiled this week.
The new dummy is called the THOR-05F, short for Test device for Human Occupant Restraint, 5th-percentile Female — representing a very small woman. Unlike previous models, it’s based on female anatomy. “The pelvis for a female is more rounded and does not hold the seatbelt the same way,” says Humanetics CEO Chris O’Connor. He also notes differences in the neck and lower leg that correlate with higher rates of leg injuries in women.
The design has been embraced by some overseas regulators, with Europe indicating plans to add it to tests in coming years. In the U.S., though, the dummy has been in limbo; NHTSA said more testing and consideration were needed before formal adoption.
Adding a new dummy is expensive — beyond development costs, individual dummies can exceed $1 million each. The THOR-05F also won’t represent all women; critics note it models an extremely small female rather than an average or diverse range of body sizes. Some safety groups argue that computer simulations, which can model many body types, are a key way to diversify testing, though others say better real-world dummy data is essential to feed those models.
This week’s publication of technical documents and specifications is an important step. “This is a long overdue step toward the full adoption of this new dummy for use in our safety ratings and Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards,” wrote NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison. But a final rule still must be published, and only then will the dummy be considered for inclusion in actual safety tests. Those tests have not yet been rewritten to include the new design.
NHTSA says it is using the female dummy in its own research and that the new release “provides the information the auto industry needs” to start using it. As for the federal New Car Assessment Program, which assigns safety ratings to new vehicles, the agency expects the process of incorporating the new dummy to start in 2027–2028.
Women Drive Too, an advocacy group that has long pressured for female crash test dummies, welcomed the announcement but urged more action. “We applaud this action, but by itself, it won’t be enough,” the coalition wrote, and it continues to push Congress to require that the dummies actually be used in real-life crash tests.
After decades of planning, the use of these new dummies in federal safety tests is still a few years away.