ACCELERATE, SMASH, REPEAT. For decades, crash tests were the only way to predict how well a car might protect the people inside. But what happens when safety engineers stretch their bell curves beyond government standards, to grasp those last tenths of a percent of improvement? When dummies are too dumb, humanbody modeling takes over.
“You see the crashtest dummy leaning out of the window after a crash. That situation has nothing in common with reality,” says Dr. Andreas Rieser, who leads a team of mechanical and material engineers at Virtual Vehicle, a research and development center in Graz, Austria.
Rieser advises the major German automakers and suppliers, among others, on a people-first approach to designing safety equipment. His partners include BMW, Daimler, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volkswagen, as well as…
