Page 10 - Bloomberg Businessweek-October 29, 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek October 29, 2018

Speed, published in 1965, changed working with crash dummies for
that, becoming a best-seller and 38 years.
cultural force. In 1966, Congress Beebe is showing off the
enacted the National Traffic and prototype at a safety confer-
Motor Vehicle Safety Act, estab- ence in downtown Detroit. It’s
lishing vehicle safety standards. In designed to represent a 70-year-
response, General Motors Co. devel- old woman who’s 5 feet 3 inches
oped the first widely accepted crash tall and weighs 161 pounds. Those
dummy by combining parts from measure ments were derived from
models made by two other compa- population data, cadaver testing,
nies. That was the Hybrid I. By the and body scans of people injured
late 1970s, the Hybrid III was estab- in car crashes.
lished as the standard for a front- The dummy has a black
end crash test. plastic 3D-printed rib cage that
In the mid-1980s, the looks like something Ben Affleck
National Highway Traffic Safety might have worn as Batman.
Administration started using cos- Beebe peels the yellow jacket
tumed dummies dubbed Vince and down to the waist to reveal a fab-
Larry in a goofy ad campaign that O’Connor ricated paunch meant to approx-
encouraged Americans to buckle imate an elderly person’s girth

“I could definitely see a need for an elderly dummy in the future”

64 up. “You could learn a lot from a dummy,” went the tag line. and plastic replicas of a liver and a spleen.
One TV commercial starred the pair in a fictional game show There are good reasons to use dummies like this. Millions
called You Lost Your Life, in which they warned that if you more elderly drivers are on the road now that the baby-boom
don’t secure your seat belt, “You could end up in places you generation has entered its 70s. They tend to have bigger waists
never dreamed—like traction!” and additional thigh fat, which can allow a seat belt to slide
O’Connor, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former General above the pelvis to the soft tissue covering organs. To create
Electric Co. executive with a background in electrical and a dummy that addresses those issues, Humanetics has spent
mechanical engineering, became CEO of dummy manufac- six years and more than $2 million. “This is our halo dummy,
turer First Technology Safety Systems on the cusp of the 2008 our Corvette,” Beebe says, gesturing to the grandma stand-in.
financial crisis. “Our customers essentially stopped spend- But the company has yet to sell a single one. “We’ve seen some
ing money,” he says. A few smaller dummy makers went out car companies say, ‘We like it,’ but nobody has said, ‘We want
of business. First Technology merged with a rival, Robert to buy one,’ ” O’Connor says.
A. Denton Inc., and the combined company was named The measurements required for government safety certi-
Humanetics. (It’s now owned by the private equity firm fications effectively demand that all companies use match-
Bridgepoint.) As CEO of the new company, O’Connor laid off ing dummies for the same tests so that results are consistent.
about 50 employees and ordered a push into emerging mar- NHTSA and the industry-funded Insurance Institute for
kets and nonauto businesses such as aerospace, where dum- Highway Safety also issue periodic safety ratings for individ-
mies are used to test military parachutes and ejection seats, ual vehicle models. The grades are based on tests conducted
among other things. He also cranked up the development by NHTSA and IIHS, so automakers would be foolish not to
of new products. In December 2015, NHTSA (pronounced use the same dummies. Car companies sometimes order cus-
“nitsa”) announced it would seek input on incorporating new tomized models for particular tests they devise on their own,
dummy models into crash tests that underlie the agency’s but regulators and the institute have outsize influence on
vehicle crash worthiness ratings. It looked like a nice break dummy-buying decisions.
for Humanetics. European regulators have indicated interest in the elderly
Humanetics dummy, which could eventually spur sales.
The crash-test dummy sits in a wheelchair, dressed in a dull Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer for the insurance
yellow jacket with its hands folded in its lap. No, it didn’t institute, says, “I could definitely see a need for an elderly
survive an especially nasty crash. “A wheelchair is just the dummy in the future. But we don’t yet have the data to make
easiest way to move it around,” says Mike Beebe, chief tech- that decision. We’re still pretty far away.”
nology officer of Humanetics and an engineer who’s been Sitting side by side in a high-ceilinged lab at the Humanetics