You're looking at the latest in high-tech safety equipment.
It's the obese crash test dummy. Yes, you heard me right -- the obese crash test dummy.
He and his family, even the wife and kids, have helped save thousands of lives.
They're the unsung heroes until now.
As we go to Make, Create, Innovate, Nick Glass is going to sit down with the brains behind the dummy.
You've all seen the hard-hitting slow motion crashes and the dummy in the driver's seat absorbing blow after blow.
This is the story of one of the great unsung heroes of our time.
You can talk to a three-year-old, you can talk to an 80-year-old, and everybody knows what a crash test dummy is.
He first started sitting in for us in 1952, when a colonel in the U.S. Air Force was worried about the safety of his pilots.
Back in that day, it was actually... the testing was done by a Colonel Stapp from the Air Force,
and he was actually very concerned, ironically, because he said,
"The Air Force pilots, I'm losing more in car crashes coming to work than I'm losing in our pilots being downed in an aircraft."
To begin with, the dummies used in cars were rather crude, made of wood, rope and sandbags,
but over the years, he's evolved into a much more sophisticated piece of technology and a family man.
So, the population of dummies expanded out from the basic male to a female, to a very large male, and then it included a child population,
because the injury rate in children in cars was dramatic.
Their role has always been the same -- thousands of crash tests, each one helping manufacturers design safer cars.
With the introduction of airbags, from the initial crumple zones to steering wheel design --
every part that's in a vehicle has improved in design over the years and all benchmarked against the crash test dummy.
This was shown rather dramatically in 2009.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the U.S. tested a new Chevrolet against a 1950s model.
Almost all the dummies in use today are made by the American company Humanetics.
Here, at their European hub in Germany, the dummies are put through their paces.
With each bone-crunching hit, they're being prepared, or rather trained, for future customers.
And there's a new addition to the family, 20 years in the making.
So, this is THOR. What's different about him?
It's our most advanced dummy.
The neck has not just rubber. It has wires and damping material that simulates the ligaments in the neck.
You have a very complicated measurement system in that chest, so you can see the complete movement of the ribs in three dimensions.
But, what's special is that it's more biofidelic. It has... it's more humanlike than it's ever been before.
And as they become more like us, the inevitable has happened.
They're developing dummies that are older and fatter.
A couple of the areas that we're seeing are like an obese person, as well as an elderly.
Both of them have a higher rate of injury or death,
and as a result of that, we have to look at how do we protect those types of people, because they're still driving cars.
We have a lot to thank the crash test dummy for.
He's helped save countless lives.
And this is what makes life as creators of the dummy so personally rewarding.
There's not a presentation I do that doesn't show the number of deaths have been reduced year over year as a result of our test equipment.
And if we can continue to save lives, reduce the amount of deaths, that's more important to me than anything else.