By Megan Benoit
May 8, 2008 -
Apparently there are those that would disagree with you. The Local (in Sweden) is reporting that Claes Tingvall, a car safety specialist, told the newspaper Expressen that GM used human cadavers in a multi-year research project (imagine the smell) to test the safety of their vehicles, possibly on the Saab side of the house. In the ultimate gesture of brand devotion, all ah… participants… allegedly donated their bodies to the cause (no word on if any of them met an untimely end whilst in a GM vehicle). GM and Saab are refusing to acknowledge any tests using their most loyal customers… er, dead human bodies. I've heard of "Cradle-to-Grave" strategies, but does GM build a car that even a dead person could drive? I think Lexus has one. Anyway, the whole thing sounds fishy. Dead men tell no tales, and while you can dissect and glean facts from trauma, there's a reason why crash test dummies are so expensive. They're specially designed to measure stresses and forces from the inside in a quantifiable way, which is more useful than a "He's dead, Jim," from an autopsy tech. I like cars,but I guess I'd rather donate my body to real science, not to a bunch of yokels in lab coats that are going to strap me into (God forbid) a G5 and run it repeatedly into walls to test the effects of excrement-based interior materials on human flesh.
Subscribe to Newsletter26 Responses to “ If you’ve ever said you wouldn’t be caught dead in a GM… ”
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May 8th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
maybe to test battery fires in a ‘volt’ on human flesh… ;)
May 8th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
There’s a very good reason that crash test dummies look the way they do.
Those blank stares…
The showing vertebrae…
The joints that seem to flop everywhere…
The “dead” weight (lol)…
Its by no means an accident (pun intended) that crash test dummies look as close as possible to dead bodies.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Maybe they were just Buick customers that were a little too old…..
John
May 8th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
At least THEY are testing real world.
That math stuff goes bad fast. Ask a Crown Victoria owner.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
This can’t be real. As pointed out already, it woudln’t serve the prupose of using real crash test dummies, measuring the forces that the body is subjected to under given circumstances.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Lumbergh21-
No, but it might give better slow-mo evidence of how a human body reacts during a crash, and it’s probably cheaper to buy a dead american than build a 250 pound, anatomically correct dummy.
It probably also does a better job demonstrating penetrating, cutting, and burning injuries that a plastic dummy outfitted with accelerometers can’t show you.
As a bonus, it’s easier to strap a cadaver into a Cobalt than a dead pig. Or so I’ve heard.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Megan- big fan of GM and the G5. Excellent contribution here. Isn’t this a bit of a reach?
May 8th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Searching Swedish words, plus the spokesman for the traffic authority’s name, turns up some references outside the local, actually. Two of the major, national newspapers have the story. There is no confirmation that Saab was directly involved, but GM is said to have performed such tests.
Heidelberg University in Germany has also used cadavers for crash tests.
The Swedish insurance company Folksam and Saab have had a decades long collaboration where Saab engineers have been allowed to study automobiles where fatal or serious injury occurred, and where they have also conferred with medical staff, coroners, etc., in order to gather as much information as possible about how to prevent injuries.
The database contains information on thousands of such automobile accidents.
Don’t think this refers to that, though.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I don’t know why this is so newsworthy. Anyone interested in the history of crash testing knows that cadavers have been used in place of dummies since the beginning. Crash test dummies are good, but they are far from perfect human stand-ins. The joints and skin are very close approximations, but are such none the less.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
@eamiller
Yes, and dummies were developed because they’re actually better, allowing for exact telemetry measuring stress forces with greater precision.