Astrid Linder won the award for leading the team that developed the pacifier that will best protect women.
International Women’s Day, the award Women’s World Car of the Year announced that the Kia Niro had been voted Best of the Year 2023 (Supreme Winner 2023). Now, the award made up exclusively of professional women in the automotive world celebrates the award for the most outstanding person of the year.
Between the 15 finalists were prominent executives and prominent women in motorsport However, the WOW (Woman of Worth) trophy awarded by the Women’s World Car of the Year went this year to Astrid Linder, creator and promoter of the first female model.
Linder is Professor of Road Safety at the Swedish National Roads and Transport Institute (VTI), Associate Professor of Injury Prevention at Chalmers University and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Center for Accident Research at Monash University (Melbourne , Australia). ).
She earned her Ph.D. in Road Safety from Chalmers University, where she also holds a degree in Engineering Physics.
Professor Linder coordinated the EU-funded ADSEAT project, which developed the first virtual female rear impact dummy, EvaRID. Until then, the models were based on the “average” male, which put the lives of women at risk.
It should be noted that Linder has also received the European Transport Champions Research Competition and the US Government Award for Excellence in Safety Engineering, among many other awards.
Marta García, executive president of Women’s World Car of the Year, says she is delighted that Astrid Linder won the WOW award. “It is a satisfaction that she has won this award, the only one in the world voted entirely by female automotive journalists,” she said.
Honorary Chair and WOW Award Coordinator Sandy Myhre said that since the first votes started rolling in, Linder has stood out from the crowd.
The female mannequin
For more than 70 years, they worked with a mannequin simulating a man of average size, relegating the physical constitution of the woman to the background.
This trend ended with the work of the team led by Astrid Linder, developing a model of 1.62 meters and weighing 62 kilos, measurements much more representative of the morphology of an average woman.
Most important, however, is that the new test dummy’s chest and hips better represent the average woman’s shapes, as well as her biomechanics, which generally have less muscle mass and strength than the average male body but much more. of flexibility.
According to information from the NHTSA, women are 73% more likely than men to be seriously injured in a car accident. In this regard, Astrid Linder, engineer and director of road safety at the Swedish National Institute for Transport and Road Research, who led the research team for the new dummy, said that the aspect of rigidity is particularly important because women are more at risk. suffering from whiplash in low-severity accidents than men.
Source: Latercera
