I was among a group of about 40 people standing on the viewing gallery above the crash hall as we watched the car approach down a long hallway, pass under us and hit the barrier, creating a shockwave we felt as much as heard. In moments it was all over: once the car stopped moving, the impact having spun it 90 degrees from its direction of travel, a crew of clean-up staff and engineers (including some from the automaker whose car was just destroyed) swarmed around it to clean up the debris and get a first look at how the car protected the crash-test dummy belted into the driver’s seat.

The IIHS is not the only U.S.-based vehicle safety testing organization. The government-run, publicly-funded National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) does similar work, but the IIHS’s (presumably) deeper, privately-funded pockets have allowed them to create a more challenging set of tests that they believe paint a more realistic crash safety picture.

“The (side-impact) barrier we developed (in the early 2000s) is based off measurements taken from the 19 biggest-selling pickups and SUVs (of that time),” said Raul Arbelaez. Today, he’s the IIHS’s VP of operations, but when he joined the organization in 1999 was one of the research engineers who developed the organization’s side impact test. “We didn’t like the barrier the government had; it was based off a (1970s-era) U.S. sedan, which was very low to the ground, and flat, and that meant the vehicle being hit was being loaded low on the rocker panel, which is a strong portion of the car.”

He’s also critical of the dummies the NHTSA was using in its side crash tests at the time. “They were not very good,” he said bluntly. “They weren’t bio-fidelic, so when you hit ’em, they weren’t going to tell you what a human would in terms of head and neck and pelvic injuries. The dummies we put in do all of that.”

They may be dummies, but they’re not cheap: basic models start at $40,000, rising to a quarter of a million bucks for those with data-capturing electronics inside. A newly developed side crash dummy is worth $660,000; needless to say, the IIHS hasn’t ponied up for any of those yet.

Not surprisingly, the dummies are not single-use throwaways: Arbelaez explained that while they do sustain damage during tests, parts are replaceable to save costs. “Ribs” in the torso often break during the side crash test, but cost “only” $30,000 for a full set.

After the test, the dummy’s data and video footage are uploaded wirelessly to the organization’s computer servers. It used to take weeks to deliver results to a carmaker, but modern technology means the manufacturer’s engineers walk away with gigabytes of data and video on a USB stick. “They leave here knowing more or less everything we know about the crash,” says Arbelaez.

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