What Your Body Needs to Look Like in Order to Survive a Car Accident
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A new road safety campaign in Australia is getting a lot of attention over a human sculpture that shows what the human body would look like if it were designed to survive a high speed car crash, Business Insider reports.
This is Graham, a life-like model that can withstand the force of a catastrophic car accident.
Transport Accident Comission - gov.au
Graham was created by artist Patricia Piccinini as part of a new ad for Australia's Transport Accident Commission as an effort to show the vulnerability of the human body.
Transport Accident Commission - gov.au
Sure, Graham is pretty scary looking with his abnormally shaped head, but according to Christian Kenfield, Royal Melbourne Hospital trauma surgeon, this is one feature key to his survival.
"One of the real injuries that we have as humans in a high-speed car crash is a neck injury, a cervical spine fracture or dislocation of the ligaments as the head flexes forward and then hyper-extends back," Kenfield told ABC. "The head is quite heavy and at rest we all have the neck muscles to hold the head upright and move it as we need to. But in a car crash we don't have the strength to stop that whip lashing injury that is so sudden and so forceful that it often causes catastrophic effects."
Transport Accident Commission - gov.au
According to Joe Calafiore, the CEO of the Australian transportation agency, humans can only survive speeds that they are capable of producing themselves.
"People can survive running at full pace into a wall, but when you're talking about collisions involving vehicles, the speeds are faster, the forces are greater, and the chances of survival are much slimmer," Calafiore said in a news release. "Cars have evolved a lot faster than humans and Graham helps us understand why we need to improve every aspect of our roads system to protect ourselves from our own mistakes."
Although Graham is supposed to be the better, more evolved version of us, people can't get over his strange appearance.
LOL AND THE LEGS CHECK OUT THE LEGS
— Sonichu ▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿ (@Sonichu1) July 21, 2016
THEY ARE LIKE FUCKING DOG LEGS
HOW WOULD THAT HELP IN A CAR CRASH
Some even turned Graham into a punch line.
According to the latest statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Highway Loss Data Institute, 32,675 people died in car accidents in 2014.
People can interact with Graham and find out what's under his skin via Google Tangle. In the meantime, Graham will be on display at the State Library of Victoria until August 8, before hitting the road.
