Sweden creates first ever female crash test dummy

Women are 73 per cent more likely to sustain injury compared to men, and in the event of a rear collision, a woman is three times more likely to suffer whiplash.

And experts around the world believe this is due to the way vehicle safety and compliance is measured before the car ever rolls out onto the road.

For the past 50 years, crash test dummies have been modelled on the average height and weight of an ordinary man.

But now, a team of Swedish engineers has unveiled the world's first female crash test dummy in the hopes of making the road safer for all drivers.

The unveiling has been many years in the works with Astrid Linder leading the project at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute.

"In order to ensure you identify the best type of seats to protect both parts of the population, you definitely need to have the part of the population at highest risk represented," Dr Linder told the BBC.

"Females are somewhat shorter and lighter than males, on average. And then we also have differences in muscle strength, which plays a role in terms of how you respond to a crash."

Although there are a number of dummies used in tests around the world that feature different heights and weights, currently it is only an industry requirement across much of the world to test a vehicle on an 'average male' dummy.

"The minimum standard that is required for a car to be sold [across Europe and other parts of the world], in the regulation it says, you have to use the model of an average male, for all the testing full stop," Dr Linder told Euro News.

Dr Linder's latest dummy is 162cm tall and weighs 62kg, which is the average dimensions of an adult woman. At the moment, she's mostly being tested on low-impact rear collision type crashes.

"The aim, hopefully, is to make it possible to make better seats both for women and men," said Swedish engineer Tommy Petterson.

"That's the reason why we had created one man and one woman."