Introducing Graham - The only human being capable of surviving a car accident without protection

What you're looking at is a human being whose body has evolved specifically to withstand the violent forces involved in a car accident.

Well, he's not actually a human. In fact, he isn't even real. Graham is the result of a collaborative experiment commissioned by Australia's Transport Accident Commission (or TAC for short), and is intended to show us what the human body would need to look like if it were indeed capable of surviving major car accidents without injury.

The fact that Graham looks extraordinarily bizarre, even mildly horrifying, is kind of the point. By emphasising just how different Graham's body is from our own, the intention of the project is to make road users more aware of just how fragile their own bodies would be in a high-impact situation.

For a start, Graham has a huge, thick skull and flat, flabby face to absorb impacts, ribs that are protected by their own individual airbags, knees with extra joints that are capable of bending in all directions, and no neck (which, conveniently, eliminates the possibility of it being broken). He's an example of what humanity might have looked like if we had evolved to withstand the forces involved in reaching the speed of a car. Unfortunately, having only recently achieved such high speeds in the history of our species, our bodies are only evolved enough to deal with forces we are capable of generating without assistance.

Created by the multidisciplinary team of David Logan, a road safety engineer, Christian Kenfield, a trauma surgeon, and Patricia Piccinini, an artist, Graham takes the form of an interactive sculpture, currently on display at the state library of Victoria.

You can interact with a 3D model of Graham (and possibly get a little creeped out in the process) here:
http://www.meetgraham.com.au/view-graham