A highly-promoted feature in the 2011 Ford Explorer are its new inflatable rear seat belts. The not-so-highly-promoted working stiffs that helped make it happen? Human cadavers. Here's how automakers still quietly use dead people to make your car safer.
When automakers and safety advocates show off the results of crash tests, they inevitably run video showing empty vehicles or crash test dummies; back in the 1980s, they even turned the dummies into lovable cartoon characters. What the industry doesn't like talking about is how much of the safety innovation in vehicles was built around testing cadavers.
Since the 1930s, when researchers at Wayne State University first threw a body down an elevator shaft to see what kind of forces it could sustain, cadavers have been essential to making driving safer. Every part of a car touching on safety — from steering columns and laminated windshields to side-impact air bags — has science from cadaver tests making sure they work.
"It's still very important," said Priya Prasad, a former top safety researcher at Ford. "Even though we have very good math modeling of dummies, human modeling hasn't reached that state yet."