Team of Swedish engineers has finally developed the first crash test dummy designed on the body of the average woman

This is a great move in the right direction. From my understanding vehicle safety rating, at least in the US suffer from the ceilling effect because cars have improved beyond our old testing methodologies.

However, I'm also reminded of an issue the air force had in designing for the average male body. Basically there's nothing useful about an average body of either sex. Everyone has some variance outside the average that causes issues. Instead safety features should be designed to accommodate the entire range of variance the humans body produces.

That'll be an interesting engineering problem when it comes to things like Airbags, which may need to deploy differently or even have different shapes depending on the 'shape' of the driver.

Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men has almost a whole chapter on this (Chapter 9: A Sea of Dudes), which also mentions Dr. Astrid Linder's research (to which this article is a nice update):

Astrid Linder has been working on what she says will be the first crash-test dummy to accurately represent female bodies. Currently, it’s just a prototype, but she is calling on the EU to make testing on anthropometrically correct female crash-test dummies a legal requirement. In fact, Linder argues that this technically already is a legal requirement. Article 8 of the legally binding Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union reads, ‘In all its activities, the Union shall aim to eliminate inequalities, and to promote equality, between men and women. Clearly, women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash is one hell of an inequality to be overlooking.

Also, I thought this part of the chapter was particularly interesting:

Even with all these gaps, the 2011 introduction of the female crash-test dummy in the US still sent cars’ star ratings plummeting. The Washington Post reported on the experience of Beth Milito and her husband, who bought a 2011 Toyota Sienna, based primarily on its four-star safety rating. But all was not as it seemed. The passenger seat, which Milito says she is likely to be sitting in when they are ‘out and about as a family’, had a two-star rating. In the previous year’s model, the front passenger seat (tested on a male dummy) had earned a top five-star rating. But the shift to female dummies revealed that in a front collision at 35 mph a female passenger had a 20-40% risk of being killed or seriously injured. The average risk of death for that class of vehicle, explains the Washington Post, is 15%.