I looked at this and figured it must be April fools day all over again!
This story is showing up on my feed reader, however I’m unable to view the full story due to the firewall sitting in front of my PC forbidding access (therefore, take care before searching for it yourselves).
I’m unsure as to the source of the story, and the accuracy of it, but it’s curious nonetheless. And more than a little distasteful and gruesome.
I know that Saab have, for a long time now, used real life crash data as a means of studying accidents and furthering safety. But this seems like something completely beyond that.
I’m quite sceptical about it and won’t be suprised if I get an email saying “don’t be rediculous”. But……
Anyone have any further ideas?
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Try this.
never heard of it.
but, here’s the link i found:
http://gas2.org/2008/05/07/gm-and-saab-reported-to-have-used-human-bodies-in-crash-tests/
i have no idea if it’s “firewall friendly,” though.
Thanks Andy.
Funny that it didn’t show up on my searches for it. I’ve also got a feed for The Local and it hadn’t come up on that yet, either. The screenshot I’ve got, above, was my feed for Google’s Blog Search.
Now…… Yuchhhhhhh!
9x, that’s the one that my office firewall didn’t like the look of.
Text below LOL @ Comment 1
GM and Saab Used Human Bodies in Crash Tests
Written by Max Lindberg
Published on May 7th, 20083 CommentsPosted in Cars, Science
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This blew me away at first, but then it does make some sense. What do you think?
According to Swedish car safety specialist Claes Tingvall, GM has wrapped up a multi-year project which used dead human bodies instead of crash dummies. Specifically, the tests were made with Saab automobiles.
Tingvall told the Swedish Newspaper Expressen, that people had donated their bodies for the tests. He said the bodies aided researcher in better design of crash dummies, and, of course, see first-hand injuries sustained by human bodies in car accidents.
The article, in the English language website, The Local, says neither Saab or GM has acknowledged using human cadavers in any tests.
A Saab spokesperson, Christer Nilsson is quoted in Expressen as saying,
“We are with GM through thick and thin. We conduct our own research and try to find other methods to achieve our results, with the help of computers, for example.”
I might mention the image you see came from the pages of Expressen, and if you go there, I hope your Swedish is good. I found no way to convert to English.
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Tags: auto crash tests, crash dummies, crash tests, Expressen, General Motors, GM, human bodies, Saab, Sweden, The Local
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3 Comments
1
bob said on May 7th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
don’t eat the swedish meatballs in the saab canteen!
2
David said on May 8th, 2008 at 12:19 am
I was just wandering how could they get over the smell.
3
jpm100 said on May 8th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Been done for a long time and in the US as well.
What’s the problem? As a human in the Kingdom of Sweden at least, you can donate your body to research. Nothing strange with that. Every day, dead bodies from such people are being taken out from cold storages at the university hospitals, cut up, hacked to pieces, x-rayed, tissues taken away for experiments etc. It’s being done so that the research on the human body can advance, new techniques for advanced surgery can be worked out, and so on. Obviously, some research institute also use bodies when trying to figure out how human tissue react to high forces. It’s well known in the industry and everyone use their test results when doing their own computer simulations or building crash test dummies.
For some reason, this made headline news yesterday in Sweden. It’s always the same when the summer arrives. Slow news day, have to find “something”… (Well, 100,000 people died in Burma the other day, but who cares?).
We should all be thankful that some people donate their body to research, the same way that lots of people choose to donate the organs. It could save our own life some day.
the tests are basicly used to make the crash test dummies better (more realistic to real world)
Is this really a big deal, considering how Mercedes-Benz have been using cadavers in crash testing for decades? In recent times, Mercedes was criticised for its use of child cadavers, which didn’t seem to please some of the more narrow minded sections of the community.
Whilst crash test dummies are useful in providing basic crash data, there’s no comparison to data obtained using the real thing.
Drew
The side curtain airbags in my 2008 9-7x Aero deployed for no reason on Tuesday May 6. My wife was driving. She was not physically hurt but very scared. The interior has $5K+ damage per informal dealer estimate. OnStar worked as advertised.
Does this count as human testing?
Hey GM, you owe us a phone call.