David Wright: 0:00

Just say your name.

David Zuby: 0:01

And my name is David Zuby. Spelled Z-U-B-Y.

David Wright: 0:04

Why and where do you work?

David Zuby: 0:05

And I work at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. I'm the Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer.

David Wright: 0:10

So you were just telling me, David about crash test dummies? Right. Vincent, Larry. Right? That's does that the beginning of the story you saw them and not inspired?

David Zuby: 0:19

So Vince and Larry were part of a public information campaign that USDA ot did to try to encourage people to wear belts. Yeah. But the Vincent Larry characters were based on actual tools that were being used for the auto industry and the government to try to make vehicles safer. So when I was finishing my engineering school, I saw an article about a switchover, the government was finally upgrading its dummy for regulatory testing. In the early in the 60s and 70s, when crash testing first started being done, there was no standard crash test. I mean, every automaker had their own sort of idea about what a crash dummy should be. At some point, they standard around something that later became known as the hybrid two.

David Wright: 1:07

Okay, that Vince and Larry?

David Zuby: 1:09

well, not really. Vince and Larry sort of look like Hybrid 2

David Wright: 1:15

like the little crosses on their heads and all that kind of stuff.

David Zuby: 1:18

Exactly. And, and the big. I mean, the big challenge of crash test dummies is to make them durable enough to be tools that you can use over and over again. Sure.

David Wright: 1:27

So more than durable than a human

David Zuby: 1:29

right, more durable than a human, but at the same time be enough like a human Yeah, if you

David Wright: 1:33

use information, what happens to a human?

David Zuby: 1:35

Exactly. So through the 70s, General Motors had embarked on a project to upgrade, the crash test dummy that would be used, and they asked the government can we use this new dummy? We think it's got advantages. It's more human, like it's got more channels of information that we can record.

David Wright: 1:54

So the government has some control over this at the time. And so they're saying these dummies are, are sanctioned by us? Yeah.

David Zuby: 2:01

In fact, the government does sanction dummies that are, are supposed to be used in showing compliance with right federal regulations, right. There's part of the Safety Act is is known as part 572. Okay, and that part 572 basically defines all of the tools that are used by the government to test whether or not automakers are in compliance with regulations. What

David Wright: 2:29

are some other tools? Here's the crash test dummies, what other like, like motion sensors or something? Or what else would there be?

David Zuby: 2:34

It's it's mostly crash test dummies, but there are regulations addressing equivalency between motion sensors, for instance, that was a big issue in the late 80s, early 90s. Was the regulation says, government labs are going to use an in depth code 7264 accelerometer, okay. You can use anything that's equivalent. Okay. But at the time, no one had written down what equivalent, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're so there is there is a standard defining what is what is equivalent? Yeah. There are also some crash carts, I forget what today's test is, but in some of the tests, the vehicle under test gets hit by something that's got four wheels across a full face. Yeah, but it's not it's not a real car. Okay, meant to represent a car. So 572 Also,

David Wright: 3:27

and that was all in place in the 80s.

David Zuby: 3:29

So some, yes, some of the parts of that 572 were in the place and 572 at the time only only defined the so called hybrid two dummy. And GM had come up with a hybrid three dummy, okay. Which they thought was a better mousetrap, and

David Wright: 3:43

that was some so your backgrounds, biomedical engineering, and these are biomedical engineers. This is one of the things that biomedical engineers do is they design crash test dummies? Yeah, well, cool. I didn't know that until I stumbled across this article. Yeah, it wasn't like, Hey, you're in high school, you should know

David Zuby: 3:57

exactly. When I was finishing engineering school. I was thinking it would be in the medical devices industry yet. But I saw this article about crash test dummies, I thought, well, it's kind of interesting on cars. And, you know, it seems like the stuff that they would have to deal with and designing crash test dummies and interpreting measurements from crest eminence would be related to stuff I learned in engineering school. And, you know, what happened in my particular case was that I mentioned this a couple times, in conversations, and to friends and family, friends and family. Right. And the idea that I wanted to be a crash test dummy engineer, yeah, around. Okay, got around to an ant yet, who knew somebody who worked for us D O. T, in particular, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at their lab in central Ohio, right. And at the time, they were looking to fill a position.

David Wright: 4:48

And where are you at the time geographically,

David Zuby: 4:50

I was graduating from Northwestern University. Okay, sorry, I had grown up in Cleveland and I was at Northwestern. Okay.

David Wright: 4:56

And so the Ohio government contractor network.

David Zuby: 5:01

Yeah, who knows? Yeah. So, you know, my, my aunt called my mom and said, You know, I understand Dave wants to be. Yeah, that's just me engineer. I talked to this guy. Oh, yeah, they're looking for a person. You know, David should send a resume to Howard Howard,

David Wright: 5:17

wait a minute, you can get my son a job!

David Zuby: 5:21

done. And so I sent a resume and it got passed on. I eventually had an interview. And, you know, I, I, so my first job out of engineering school was working at a company called Transportation Research Center center of Ohio, which has got its own long history. But at the Transportation Research Center of Ohio, which is located in East liberty, which is about 50 miles north of Columbus. There was also the vehicle research and Test Center of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So there was a resident lab that was belonged to and run by the federal government on this big crash on this big facility

David Wright: 6:05

doing crash test. Yeah, right. Using the dummies. Right. So building the dummies? Did they didn't get made in house? Like who makes this?

David Zuby: 6:13

I'll get to that in a minute. Okay. Sure. Just to finish that. So my job was, you know, with trc, I was a contracted employer to support the work of us DOD. Okay, at this research to Sony. Yeah, we, I mean, we worked with dummies, we didn't make them. Yeah. But as part of the work that we did crash testing and other experiments using dummies, we, you know, took them apart, you break them, yeah, took them apart, put them back together again, you know, trying to figure out better ways to use them. Yes, kinds of ways.

David Wright: 6:43

So what were they made of at the time? What was the state of the art and the craft?

David Zuby: 6:47

So the, the, what they're made out of hasn't changed all that much. Okay, generally, the skeletons are made out of metals, like steel and aluminum like Wolverine. Yeah. And then they have coatings that are made of different kinds of plastic or rubber materials, okay? To represent the skin. Yep. Like Terminator two, Terminator one, da da 100. Possibly. So, and, you know, there are if when, if you get a chance to look at the dummy lab, you can you can see, for instance, that the the ribs are these bands of thin steel, but then glued to the bands of steel is this plastic material that sort of makes the rib less springy? Because the living human bone is not as springy as steel hoop. Okay, right. Interesting. And so there are these kinds of things that and the neck, for instance, your neck is made up of, you know, seven vertebrae, yeah, hard bones that are connected by ligaments and muscles, and so on and so forth. No real pins or anything in between them the dummies neck is there there are two styles. One is a series of rubber discs separated by metal discs. And then the rubber discs are have different diameters and some of them have cuts in them to give the right bending,

David Wright: 8:11

right. So there is a move similarly to human and then there's another sports rubber, which parts metal. So just thinking like so the verbage a derby are the metal parts and the rubber like the dissymmetry.

David Zuby: 8:22

Yeah, so in that in that particular neck, there isn't a one to one correlation, okay, for

David Wright: 8:26

the person, right, some other structure that's equivalent to exactly the accelerometers.

David Zuby: 8:32

And, and then the other dummy that we have specially designed for looking at neck injuries, and he's actually got a plastic vertebrae for each of the vertebrae in your neck. Yeah. In that dummy, the vertebrae are connected with with pins, you know, so it's just like a door hinge. Yeah. Which is not very lifelike, right. But for motion front to back, it's pretty, it does a pretty good job, because there are these little dampers and some springs and some cables that are routed through the neck vertebra to motion as if it were constructed more

David Wright: 9:06

like a human. And so how do you how do you account for muscle tension relaxation during an accident, right? Because because it's not it's not a continuous? Yeah, that's, that's one of the big challenges. Okay? Because you might freeze right? And you have a different kind of set of resistance in your neck, then you just kind of loose.

David Zuby: 9:21

Yeah, and that issue has been known for a long time, but there, we haven't really come up with a good solution for how you represent that in the crash test dummy. Yeah, because the crash test dummies are still even the latest versions are passive devices. Yep. And so in tuning the squishiness of the ribs or the bendability of the neck, or what have you. There's sort of a compromise between what we know from experiments done on Davar ever Yeah. Which are dead and don't have muscle tissue. Yeah. And what we know from experiments involving lower levels of force on volunteers. Yep. Or, you know, just asking people to, you know, pick up weights or something like that to try to get some sense of how that influences. And so the passive qualities of the dummy are sort of a compromise between what we know about living tissue and what we know about dead tissue that is exactly the same shape and size.

David Wright: 10:26

So this must like theory, calm and measuring whiplash. I'm thinking like, is that a condition that's hard to kind of figure out with these dummies,

David Zuby: 10:33

Whiplash is especially complicated injury to understand because Whiplash is essentially defined as the symptom following the injury. Sure. People have seen some kind of violent insult to their neck, and then they complain of pain. Yeah, in most cases, that pain resolves itself within a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, you know, with something as simple as taking aspirin. Yeah. But in, I think it's like one in 10 cases, people persist having pain or dizziness or ringing in the ears for four months after the after the injury. And that the exact nature of what tissues are damaged is still that not maybe none come. Well, that's and that that complicates things right? as you'd like, Whatever you do in the lab, to represent what really happens in the real world. Yeah, but the signal that you have from the real world is contaminated by people either exaggerating or completely bluffing,

David Wright: 11:39

trying to get an insurance plan. God forbid, right?

David Zuby: 11:42

So, you know, the biomechanics is pretty clear that you can do injury to the neck, yes, the nerve tissues, the muscle tissues, and even you can have skeleton, they can

David Wright: 11:53

be injured, they are vulnerable.

David Zuby: 11:54

Yeah, right. But what, but the, what they call, I think the second delay is what they call it and medically the consequences of those injuries. It gets fuzzy and linking, you know, a certain type of pain to a certain damage to a certain tissue is something that's still being studied. So the way we've approached it in our work is, you know, there is this basic idea that if the head and the neck and the body all move together so that there's no bending of the neck, there's little chance of any of the tissues in the neck becoming injured. Right. So that was the inspiration in the 1960s to require cars to have head restraints. Yep. And in fact, if you there were several studies that showed when cars started being required to have head restraints, the incidence of neck injuries following a rear crash went down. So every strain is just a pat in the back of the pad at the back of the seat. Yeah. Now, the regulation that went on the books was not very good. Mainly, the two critical things were that it didn't require how to strings to be tall enough to cover everybody who might be driving it, you're riding in a car. And it didn't require the adjustment to lock in place. So we've even got some video that we did with a crash test dummy where you've got the head of strain adjusted to its fullest position. Looks pretty good. Like it might actually catch the head. But the dummy's head hits it, and he pushes it all the way down, and you end up with this big bad neck.

David Wright: 13:28

Yeah. pretty ugly to see.

David Zuby: 13:30

So we did a series of tests, showing that some head restraints did a better job of preventing the neck bending than other head restraints, and then build up a vehicle ratings based on that. And as automakers changed their designs to comply with our requirements for a good rating, we did another study and found a ha. neck injury rates went down again, wow, for good for support. So I tell you that story, mainly to make the point that despite the fact that we know that there's exaggeration and fraud, given the claiming of injury for next, we also know that there's real injury, but also know that we've been able to address it Yeah, even though we don't know exactly what's happening inside the neck to cause these symptoms that people get

David Wright: 14:22

you got the outcome you wanted when I process that you demonstrate therefore the word right, so how about the crash the progression of the crash test? I mean, so hybrid to today are hybrid one I suppose today, you know, what, what, what are? Is there a standard now? I guess there's one question.

David Zuby: 14:38

Yeah. So the, the current crash test standards use mainly what is still the hybrid three. Okay, dummy. There are two sizes written into regulation. One is the average size male and the other is the small female. For side crash test regulations, there's a separate dummy Right, which is known as the Euro sin for European side impact. I mean, that is the basis for crash test regulations. There is a new generation of dummies that in frontal crashes is known as four and four side crashes is known as world said, because it was developed by a world Consortium. Those dummies have been under development for something like 20 years

David Wright: 15:30

Wow. Just gonna be able to agree on stuff for that they are trying to get everybody trying to get everybody agree on on stuff. Like what would the disagreement but disagreement?

David Zuby: 15:41

Well, I mean, it's, you know, how much attention needs to be paid to the fidelity between the dummy response and the reference cadaver response.

David Wright: 15:53

But as long as it's better than the prior version, surely you say, Okay, keep going. Let's do another one.

David Zuby: 15:57

Exactly. I mean, you know, when you're working within a similar organization, or in a single organization, right, you can, you can more easily say, Okay, this is this is enough better. But if you've got bunches of organizations, and one's working on the neck, and another one's working on the ribs, and the ones working on the hips, you have you have the situation where not everybody's working in sequence. And so the guys may be may think they're finished but the shoulder guys say, hey, wait a minute, we see a problem with Yeah. And, and so it never gets resolved. And so hybrid three is still in place as a hybrid three is basic is is the dummy that is used in all regulatory testing, and that's not what you use. We do use the hybrid three in our frontal crash tests. We are currently running experiments with the Thor dummy Okay, to see whether or not using the more advanced dummy gets us better information.

David Wright: 16:58

Why Thor Thor as in like the thunder god?

David Zuby: 17:00

Well, Thor stands for stand for, what does it stand for..

David Wright: 17:03

Something that spells Thor, which is an awesome name for it.

David Zuby: 17:09

Yeah, it's an acronym that has something to do with the thorax.

David Wright: 17:12

Okay. Okay.

David Zuby: 17:13

So it's not related to

David Wright: 17:14

you modify them? There's sensors inside these dummies? I mean, they're worse with the technology. Do you have to do change it up for it? Because your crash tests are looking for different kinds or more information? I would suspect then the regulations require?

David Zuby: 17:26

Right. Yeah, I mean, the the biggest customization that is done typically on the dummies is the compliment of sensors that you put inside. Yeah. So yeah, we we measure things that are not part of regulation? Yeah. We measure things that we don't even evaluate that we're just sort of measuring sort of forward link looking, you know, sure. Is there some day we can make use of this new bench? Totally. Yeah. And so that's, that's the there are other chain is there are other electronic measurement devices inside Legos or do hook up a USB cord to the dummy and download data, like do that or do you? Yeah, I mean, and today, most of the dummies have a solid state recorder inside. Yeah. And so the wires, right? Yeah. Blackbox. It's blue. But it's Yeah, same idea. Same idea. So the wires are relatively short connecting the sensor to the recorder. But that's only been possible relatively late. Sure. Yeah. So in the early days, there were big long wires. That connected inside semi inside the dummy went out of the car into a recorder. Okay, typically magnetic tape. Yeah, sure. pulled along in a trailer. A lot of failure points to the car. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then, you know, some indoor truck crash testing labs had big long cables that went to record or mounted on the floor in the lab. And then I think Ford was one of the first companies to shrink all of that recording material, recording equipment down into a size that would fit in the trunk. And then when we built this lab here, we bought a recorder that was completely solid state and it was about the size of a loaf of bread now and could fit inside the chest of many dummies. Yeah. Not the smallest ones, but but certainly mid size and above. And now we've got a solid state record. That's about the size of the cigarette pack

David Wright: 19:28

now. Smartphone parts. Yeah. Cameras and stuff in this thing. Yeah, at some point, you got to think right, right. Maybe you have accelerometers inside the dummy. Yeah.

David Zuby: 19:37

So they're accelerometers. There are what we refer to as load cells measure force. And most load cells are based on what what in engineering is known as strain gauge technology. So you apply a very thin piece of foil and that foil has a property that when it's stretched, the resistance changes. Yeah. So by measuring the resistance going through that piece of foil, you can estimate the force if you know the shape of the thing it's attached to. Yeah. And so there are a bunch of load cells that have these strain gauges, glued in certain configurations that allow you to measure force in different positions, the force applied to that piece of the dummy.

David Wright: 20:27

How much of the internal anatomy do you use as kind of like a inspiration for where you put stuff? I mean, do you do you think about that at all? Like To what degree are these dummies model? Aside from physical outward appearance and some mechanical capacities or anything else inside it like that?

David Zuby: 20:43

Yeah. So past the ribcage, nothing resembles a human being right. All right. And but the sensors, you know, there are a lot of sensors around the ribcage because

David Wright: 20:55

Target lot of stuff in there. That's pretty important.

David Zuby: 20:57

Exactly. And that's one of the one of the kinds of severe and fatal injuries to people suffering, the more severe crashes. So there's a lot of instrumentation in the neck and the head. Yep. Moving that, you know, measuring the motion of the head gives you a way to interpret what might have happened to the brain. And then there's a lot of sensors in the legs because when the occupant cabin starts to collapse, the legs are the first thing sort of in the way.

David Wright: 21:22

I mean, we're gonna do some video on this as part of this series of media and putting together but, man, it's amazing that people gonna walk after some of this stuff. And obviously they cannot.

David Zuby: 21:32

Yeah, and there's not there's not much instrumentation in the arms, yet. They, you know, arms do get injured in crashes. Generally, the injuries to the arms are not life threatening, and so they're not much attention has been paid. In the last 50 years of crash testing,

David Wright: 21:47

how about perception? How about like, is this how somebody feel in a crash at all relevant here? Or is this just kind of insults and impacts and stuff? What do you think about? I think it doesn't matter happens so fast. I like what they see. And I don't hear is that kind of thing matter?

David Zuby: 22:04

So I mean, I'm not sure the role of emotion

David Wright: 22:11

Sure right, yeah. Right.

David Zuby: 22:12

You mentioned hearing and there are aspects of the years that are important. One of the things that automakers learned early on about airbags, was that if you're driving around in a car with all the windows closed, and you suddenly inflate a big several leader, balloon, you create a pressure wave inside the car. Okay. Wow. Right. And in some instances that can cause damage to the years. So I think Mercedes recently has got some kind of, like in the event that the airbags about to fire they do some sort of a pre noise that triggers some some like flux of response inside the ear to make it less susceptible to the pressure change injury. That's pretty cool. The other thing that that came out of early airbags, for instance, and you may see in today's crash, but there's sometimes smoke comes out of it. airbags, okay, and the smoke today's there's much less smoke than there used to be, and it's less irritating than it used to be because the airbag inflators now have lots of filters.

David Wright: 23:24

detonator is there that that triggers the

David Zuby: 23:27

it's basically like an explosion. Okay. So pyrotechnic device that gets a electric shock. And it burns, burns really quickly creating a bunch of gas that fills up the airbag, right. But some of the combustion byproducts are irritating to people's respiratory system. And so, you know, there were in the early days, there were tests to find out. What was the nature of the smoke that's coming out of the airbags? And do we have to filter that to make sure that we don't cause anybody respiratory distress as a result of having been in a crash when deployed?

David Wright: 24:10

So let's come back to the question of who makes the dummies.

David Zuby: 24:13

So who makes the dummies? Right? So right now there is pretty much only one company, okay. And this company called human ethics, okay. It's headquartered in Michigan.

David Wright: 24:25

Where in Michigan?

David Zuby: 24:26

in the Detroit area, I think, between Detroit and Dearborn, I'm not exactly sure can't right where they're headquartered

David Wright: 24:33

center of the automobile universe for many years.

David Zuby: 24:36

Now, but that has that has changed over the years because going back again to the 70s, there was there were at least two or three companies that was Alderson research labs, and there was a human X early generation and there was something else. And then there were some like mergers Yeah, sure, and other companies going out of business. snus, at the time that we built this research center, they were primarily two companies. One was called the vector research in Toledo, Ohio, and the other was first technology. And they were in, in the Detroit area. And I can't remember if they combined or whether one just went out of business, but we're in the current state of there's just one, basically one company and

David Wright: 25:21

so these companies only made crash test dummies, but do they make other stuff?

David Zuby: 25:25

They make some other stuff. So human attics now makes a lot of the sensors,

David Wright: 25:34

okay. sensors that go into dummies?

David Zuby: 25:36

they go in the dummy. And, and they and its predecessor company didn't make sensors, but they acquired the company that was making these load cells that are custom made to fit in the different parts of the domain. They provide calibration services for both the insert the sensors and for the dummy parts themselves. And they do make other related test equipment a lot more for laboratory equipment that's intended to help take care of the dummies over there over the over the life of the crash test.

David Wright: 26:12

And are these dummies only used for car crashes? Are they used for other things, too?

David Zuby: 26:16

So the dummies that we use are primarily used only for car crashes. They occasionally get used in testing of aircraft. Yep. But there have been efforts in the last probably 20 years by the military to develop dummies that were specially designed to measure the forces, so different CRN in aircraft crashes or IEDs. Blowing up on the tank. Right? Right. Where, where the insulting force is coming from a different direction. Yeah, you have to think about, you know, you care about different stuff. You care about different stuff. And motorcycles, any point? So by doing motorcycle crash tests with dummies, but they're not really good for that. Yeah. boats. Boats, as far as I know, there is

David Wright: 27:09

a lot of human safety stuff in the boat. No, there are life jacket.

David Zuby: 27:13

As far as I know nobody crash tests boats on purpose.

David Wright: 27:17

Okay, fine. few beers. How long did crash test dummies last?

David Zuby: 27:23

They last for several years. And again, although I often say you know, at the end of 10 years, it's possible that the dummy was serial number 123 is essentially got all new shirt. Yeah, hearts because at some point you break something or wears out or

David Wright: 27:40

not dissimilar from a human. They say seven years your cells all regenerate. All different kind of being

David Zuby: 27:44

right. So. But

David Wright: 27:47

you do that on site here. So you'll you'll do custom maintenance on that.

David Zuby: 27:51

Yeah, we do all we do the maintenance, we send some of the stuff out some of the more complicated and less frequent things that need to be done to take care of the damage. We started out. Yeah. And then but most of this stuff was

David Wright: 28:04

a new dummy cost. Or, like a subscription plan?

David Zuby: 28:10

Well, I haven't tried to buy one there in the neighborhood of 70,000 to$100,000, the new generation the store dummies. When you add all the instrumentation and data recorders are a million bucks. Wow. But the ones like, family that we've been, you know, a lot of people use are, are an order of magnitude less expensive.

David Wright: 28:36

Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, 100 1000s I was gonna guess temp. I was thinking about whether we're just trying to say 10. That's, that's a big number. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just the materials. I guess they got to make it by hand.

David Zuby: 28:48

Right. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're essentially made to order. How many did they make a year? I don't you think it's it's probably less than 100? Yeah. Yeah. For Dummies a year? Yeah. would be my guess. But I'm not. I'm not exactly

David Wright: 29:03

who else buys them.

David Zuby: 29:03

So the makers make them the government agencies make them. You know, there are other organizations like us around the world. Yeah, they have different funding mechanisms. But, but there are other organizations that do in in crash testing independent of the government and independent of the automakers. And there are around the world, several contract facilities like the TRC, where I first went to work, you know, a lot of, although I worked in the division that supported the work of DOD. And a lot of that company's revenue was generated by work it did for automakers, or parts suppliers, or in even some cases, lawyers and insurance companies that are trying to, you know, generate data to defend some kind of lawsuit.

David Wright: 29:52

Would they rent a dummy?

David Zuby: 29:54

Can that be done? Oh, yeah. So you can buy a crash test right? Yeah, can go to GRC of Ohio or mgas. Another company or Cal span in Buffalo, New York and say, A, I've got a question that I think would be answered by a crash test. I've got a budget to write.

David Wright: 30:08

Yeah. Which would be several $100,000. When we think Yeah, exactly. That's neat. Well, I mean, push go back to the group. But any anything else about your role that we have with us crash test dummies? What else do you do here?

David Zuby: 30:20

Well, in my role, I'm sort of responsible for overseeing and coordinating all of the research activities. So that extends from the testing that we do here at the research center, to the analyses that Matt's group does involving the insurance data. And we have a group of researchers who are in maths group and are at the research center, but do research using either data that is publicly available, like the fatal accident reporting system data, which the government collects, or works with contractors to generate unique datasets. So we're a member of a consortium at MIT, for instance, that is gathering on the road. Vehicle motion and driver behavior data for cars that have new technologies might not understand how people use these new cars. We do studies involving infrastructure, road infrastructure, a lot of work on roundabouts, for instance, you know, showing that when you replace the traditional intersection with roundabout editors,

David Wright: 31:32

yeah, they're better. They're better. Yeah.

David Zuby: 31:35

And they're better from transportation engineering standpoint, because in a lot of applications, traffic keeps flowing. Yeah. And it's self adjusts. You know, if, if this is parts of the day, heavy traffic is in one direction and other parts that it's in another direction. It sort of takes care of itself.

David Wright: 31:53

Where if you're, like three in the morning, you know, sit there at a red light being like, What on earth am I doing? Yeah, exactly. You can just drive through the roundabout. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So I mean, these different datasets is pretty unique. I think perspective on autos at you guys have here.

David Zuby: 32:07

Yeah, I think one of the things that's unique about IHS and Hilde is the fact that I mean, we're not just vehicles. And we're not just, you know, behavioral policy interventions. And we're not just insurance data, but we, you know, we're involved in all of that. Yeah. And have been, you know, for for the course of our existence. And in the last, I would say, 15 years, we put a lot of effort in trying to, you know, do analyses that use both the insurance data on the one side and other data from another side to, you know, to get more insight than we could, by using the data sight that data datasets in isolation

David Wright: 32:44

and you're you're a Think Tank, I suppose, is that the right way of thinking about this organization funded by, by private organizations by companies?

David Zuby: 32:52

Yeah, I mean, we do some think tanking, publishing paper, but, you know, mainly, you know, we're trying to do research and the research, I think, there are two big veins in the research. One is sort of research that helps describe the problems caused by crashes in enough detail to point to possible solutions. Yep. And then the other part of the research is, if we can find common measures that have been implemented somewhere, test whether those kind of measures are making the difference. Yeah. And, and then, alongside the research, we also have a very strong communications effort. Yeah. So that the research doesn't just sit on a shelf. Yeah. So a lot of times, you know, when when we do research about automated enforcement around abouts, for instance, we try to get that in front of as many people as possible so that DOD planners considering new, you know, road building, will consider roundabouts are communities that are having problem with regularly running crashes by considering automated enforcement, those kinds of things.

David Wright: 34:03

So final question. If you could change one thing about either behavior or regulation or technology or something that that you can do today, we could do today, the government good today, companies here today, what would it be? What's the lowest hanging fruit? for Highway Safety?

David Zuby: 34:18

Well, probably the lowest hanging fruit would would be getting people to obey traffic laws, including speed limits. Yeah. Okay. It's not necessarily the easiest problem to solve.

David Wright: 34:33

I mean, it's not so hard. You just put sensors on the bridges on the

David Zuby: 34:36

Yeah, and build a car that won't, won't exceed the speed limit. Yeah. But it does require a great deal of political and public desire to do that. Yeah. You know, and there is a strong current in, in society and especially here today, people wanting to be free.

David Wright: 34:57

Yeah, sure. Well, yeah.

David Zuby: 35:00

And even just disregard the law.

David Wright: 35:01

I want to get to where I'm going fast. I have to say asked the same question of Matt when I interviewed him, and my instinctive response to that was damn it. Because, you know, you're in a rush see what you know, like sometimes and these are the problems, obviously. Right. But I do get that that's the, you know, that's a problem. Problem with our behavior.

David Zuby: 35:23

People behavior is the big people's behavior is the big problem. And it's not that people are driving around one thing to crash. Of course not. It's just that in circ.. enough circumstances

David Wright: 35:34

not not wanting to not crash enough. Right? Well, exactly. Yeah.

David Zuby: 35:37

Right. Not wanting to crash enough to, you know, moderate their behavior when there's pressure from other

David Wright: 35:44

not being aware enough that crashing can happen. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's one of the great things to look forward to seeing today is is what happens when a crash is brings it to mind right now. Thanks very much, Dave.

David Zuby: 35:54

Yeah, you're welcome.