GOTEBORG, Sweden — Crash testing has yielded very little about what happens to a fetus in a car crash so, but engineers with Volvo say that’s all about to change.

The company has developed the world’s first official computer model of a pregnant crash dummy.

With a design based on a woman at a late stage of pregnancy, when the unborn baby is at the most risk, the designers have been working since January to refining the model.

“Now it’s finished and we’ve started running simulated front-end impact tests on it,” says Volvo biomechanical engineer Camilla Palmertz.

“One big advantage is that both mother and baby can be scaled up or down to the size we want to study.”