Vägverket, the Swedish Road Administration, is reporting that General Motors used ten human cadavers for crash research. While it isn't clear which GM vehicle hosted the corpses on their one-way trip into a wall, a spokesman for Vägverket said it was most likely the Saab brand. The spokesman was also quick to point out that all of the cadavers were people "who had donated their own bodies." (Well, that is comforting to know!)

While cadavers were used in the earliest crash tests (first started in the late 1930s), most of us were under the assumption that fully-instrumented million-dollar synthetic crash test dummies, or computer simulations, had replaced human remains in current testing. Apparently, some folks at GM may have been thinking otherwise. As of today, neither General Motors or Saab have acknowledged any tests involving dead bodies, but our hunch says this issue hasn't been laid to rest. Thanks for the tip, Will!

UPDATE: Saab called to let us know that neither it nor General Motors use "postmortem human test subjects" for safety research, nor do they have the facilities to even do so. They do, however, provide funds to certain bio-mechanical research projects, often through universities, the results of which they use to make better crash test dummies.

[Source: The Local]

Ghastly! Saab may have used human cadavers for safety research originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 08 May 2008 16:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.