If you’ve ever said you wouldn’t be caught dead in a GM…
Apparently there are those that would disagree with you. The Local (in Sweden) is reporting that Claes Tingvall, a car safety specialist, told the newspaper Expressen that GM used human cadavers in a multi-year research project (imagine the smell) to test the safety of their vehicles, possibly on the Saab side of the house. In the ultimate gesture of brand devotion, all ah… participants… allegedly donated their bodies to the cause (no word on if any of them met an untimely end whilst in a GM vehicle). GM and Saab are refusing to acknowledge any tests using their most loyal customers… er, dead human bodies. I’ve heard of “Cradle-to-Grave” strategies, but does GM build a car that even a dead person could drive? I think Lexus has one. Anyway, the whole thing sounds fishy. Dead men tell no tales, and while you can dissect and glean facts from trauma, there’s a reason why crash test dummies are so expensive. They’re specially designed to measure stresses and forces from the inside in a quantifiable way, which is more useful than a “He’s dead, Jim,” from an autopsy tech. I like cars,but I guess I’d rather donate my body to real science, not to a bunch of yokels in lab coats that are going to strap me into (God forbid) a G5 and run it repeatedly into walls to test the effects of excrement-based interior materials on human flesh.