We may not be able to tell teens to listen to their parents, but we can test for their safety.

Before you and your loved ones get behind the wheel of your new General Motors vehicle, another family already tested it – a family of crash test dummies.

The 170 crash test dummies at the Milford Proving Ground have been designed in varying sizes in order to better represent the varying sizes of vehicle passengers.  Some of these dummies are used exclusively for frontal impacts, while others are designed and used for side or rear impacts.

Front and side impact  dummies weighing only 100 lbs. are used to help design vehicles for young teenagers or smaller adult females.  Older or larger teenagers are represented by the larger adult dummies in our inventory.

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Jack Jensen is the Technical Manager for the Vehicle Safety & Crashworthiness Lab at Milford Proving Ground.  Jensen and his team are responsible for the testing and maintenance of GM’s crash test dummies.

“We have more sophisticated dummies, computers to monitor crashes and new facilities to observe different types of potential hazards,” said Jensen, “All those things together give our engineers the ability to design a broad range of vehicles that safely get our customers where they need to go.”

One of the most commonly used crash dummies, the Hybrid III, was designed here at GM in the 1980s. The Hybrid III dummy became the universal standard for frontal crash testing and remains so today across the globe.  Each Hybrid III dummy is a highly sophisticated piece of technology that provides up to 70 channels of data.

The Hybrid III dummy is used today for motor vehicles regulations in countries across the globe.