"Idiots behind the wheel are the real road safety challenge." These are the words of "Rusty" Haight, a man who actually wrecks cars for a living. "Rusty" Haight could be described as a living crash test dummy. He has been involved in 976 road accidents since 1994. So far, however, apart from bruising and sore ribs, he has escaped serious injury.
Driving one vehicle into another is just part of the job for this former accident investigator for the San Diego Police Department. Today, Rusty Haight is director of the Collision Safety Institute in San Diego, an independent institute for accident research, training and accident advice. Haight reconstructs traffic collisions in order to improve road safety. In so doing, however, he prefers to leave the high-speed, high-impact destructive crashes to a real crash test dummy. But there's no substitute, he argues, for the human driver when investigating at somewhat slower speeds.
For serious accidents, the dummy has to take its turn
"When I'm driving I can replicate different types of movements, providing different parameters for crash data. Crash dummies are good, but at the end of the day they're just motionless dolls. Although they can survive serious collisions, they're not always representative. They don't show how the human body moves in the event of collisions which are less serious than those we experience with the 'standard dummies'," says Haight.
This is the big difference between him and a real crash test dummy, such as Rudi. Rudi has been in 600 road accidents during his career. Apart from some dents and scratches, he has also emerged pretty much unscathed from all this. Rudi is one of ten crash test dummies used at the Allianz Center for Technology (AZT) in Ismaning, Germany.