Early Crash Test Dummies Were Pigs

After going over the popularity of the crash dummies in the 90's that spawned a video game, comics and a cgi special I wondered who owned the property. It seems two toy companies Tyco and Mattel did at different points, but while learning about the toys I learned how dead bodies and pigs were used for early car safety.

Early in the car industry dead human bodies were mainly used to see how impacts affected people in cars. Around the 1950's they switched to animals. A quote from wikipedia tells us how odd it got.

"We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing...We observed a pig, anesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep-dish steering wheel at about 10 mph."


Pigs were used often as they have a similar biology to humans and could be seated some what like a person. Don't worry for animals now as they stopped doing live testing in the early 90's in the car industry, but I wonder if they had a lot of barbecues every time a pig crashed.


Read more about it here.