For decades, the car industry has worked on the assumption that a crash is a crash, and that a well-engineered car protects whoever is inside it. The reality has always been messier. Independent research on both sides of the Atlantic has repeatedly found that women are more likely to be seriously hurt or killed in the same collision than men. Now Volvo has published a study claiming that, across its own line-up, that gap has effectively closed.
The claim is a significant one. Volvo’s findings rest on its own real-world crash data, while the wider body of evidence, the crash test dummy fleet and even the regulator’s own roadmap suggest the rest of the industry is some way from parity.
What Volvo’s study actually says
Volvo describes the work as the first manufacturer-wide analysis of its kind, covering an entire line-up rather than the single-model investigations that independent bodies typically carry out. Its conclusion is striking: all body types receive identical levels of crash protection in its cars.
The company attributes that parity not to any single breakthrough but to gradual, cumulative innovation. Side impact protection systems introduced in the 1980s feature in its explanation, as does the more recent multi-adaptive safety belt. Study lead Lotta Jakobsson frames the publication as a template others could follow, describing it as “like a cookbook of what you could do [and] how you could do [it] if you are interested in addressing different areas.”
It is a deliberately open-handed gesture from a brand that has built much of its identity on safety. It is also a claim that sits awkwardly against the independent picture.
The evidence of inequality
In the UK, the Transport Research Laboratory found in 2024 that female occupants are “significantly” more likely to be injured in a car accident than male equivalents, with side impacts emerging as a particular problem area. Research from the University of Virginia’s Centre for Applied Biomechanics, which examined US crash data, found that females are 47 per cent more likely to be seriously injured in a crash and 17 per cent more likely to be killed. Those are not marginal differences, and they point to something structural in how cars are designed and how their protection is assessed. Volvo’s study does not dispute that the problem exists industry-wide. It argues that Volvo has solved it internally.
The crash test dummy problem
Part of the explanation lies in the tools used to develop and rate cars. Crash test dummies have been almost exclusively based on the male physique since their introduction in the 1970s, meaning they do not account for structural differences between the sexes.
The situation in Europe has improved only slowly. Euro NCAP’s only adult female dummy is effectively a shrunken version of the male equivalent, representing just five per cent of the female population. The first official regulatory dummy built to represent the average female, the THOR-5F, was introduced in the United States for NHTSA testing in late 2025 and has yet to be used in Euro NCAP testing.
Jakobsson is blunt about the limits of this approach. “We have three sizes of adult crash test dummies today, and that’s good,” she says. “But even if we double it, it will still [represent] a very small part of the population.”
Vulnerability depends on the situation, not one group
Jakobsson, who is also a part-time professor at Chalmers University of Technology, resists the idea that any single group is simply the most vulnerable. “Everyone is different from each other,” she says. “It’s not just one person being the most vulnerable, because it really depends on the situation.”
Her examples are specific. Older women, she notes, are typically more at risk “because they simply are more fragile.” An occupant with restricted load-bearing properties may benefit from a knee airbag, while a smaller person may never strike their knees at all because the seatbelt holds them back. In a car running off the road into a ditch, it is the larger, heavier individual who could face the greatest risk from the intense vertical load. That nuance argues against a single fix and in favour of designs that account for a range of bodies and a range of crashes.
Regulation versus manufacturer ambition
Where Jakobsson is most critical is in her assessment of the rulebook itself. Current safety regulations, she argues, focus on “addressing singular points which are super-important to get the five stars, but may not represent the real world.”
Euro NCAP’s Vision 2030 mission statement proposes introducing the THOR-5F dummy to help evaluate whether a car is correctly “designed for all.” Jakobsson welcomes the direction but is realistic about its limits. Widening safety regulations is “good,” she says, but the sheer number of tests required to cater for every body type makes legislating for it unviable. Her answer is that manufacturers should innovate instead.
“It’s all about your own ambition,” she says. “If you want to go that extra mile, then that pays up.” She adds a practical argument for doing so: “If you address that vulnerable person, the good thing is the other one is protected too, because they are better off from the start.”
The awkward detail for anyone weighing up Volvo’s announcement is that many safety features in current Volvo models are also available on rival cars. The differentiator, on Jakobsson’s own account, is design intent and the ambition to go beyond what the tests demand, rather than a proprietary piece of hardware.
Elsewhere in the sector, the regulatory picture continues to move, while manufacturers juggle competing priorities, as seen when Nissan bet on hybrids, Tesla won more European FSD approvals and Volvo froze hiring. Safety ambition, it seems, has to compete with everything else on the board.
Volvo’s study is a useful contribution to the debate, and its willingness to publish a methodology others could copy is welcome. But a manufacturer declaring the gender safety gap closed is not the same as the gap being closed. Until the dummy fleet, the test protocols and the independent crash data catch up, the safest assumption for buyers is that the industry still has work to do.
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