A Bang-up Job In Name of Safety
Toyota’s Dana Buckley gets to crash cars.
It had to be one of the great pickup lines of all time.
In 2012, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute senior named Dana Buckley wandered by Toyota’s recruitment booth at the Society of Women Engineers conference in Chicago.
Buckley wasn’t particularly interested in an automotive engineering career. She had a more altruistic goal—she was interested in talking to medical development companies, seeking to put her degree to use helping people by designing and building prosthetic limbs.
Maybe that’s why she came up with what she thought might be a throwaway line to start a conversation.
“Who gets to crash the cars?’’ she asked.
It was a question born of curiosity.
“I knew that, in a company like Toyota, someone has to crash the cars for testing,’’ she says. “Maybe it was a dumb or bold question, but I thought, ‘Can I do that, too?’ It turned out that now I get to crash the cars.’’
Going to work as a safety engineer for Toyota turned out to be a different path to her goal of helping people.
As a youngster growing up in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Buckley started out hoping to be a veterinarian, loving animals in general and horses in particular instead of horsepower.
“I never expected that exactly what I wanted to do would be offered by a car company,’’ she says. “I never envisioned myself as a stereotypical engineer. I’m not the kind of person who sits around and solves math problems all day.’’
She is, however, the kind of person who applies her craft in the real world.
Last winter, while out running errands, another car ran a stop sign and smashed into the front passenger side of her 2012 Camry.Once she realized she wasn’t injured, she did what most of us would do: Shut down the car, got out, and started assessing the damage.
“I was a little shaken up,’’ she says today, “but I had to see how the hood crumpled. I had to figure out why the bumper sheared off.
“I immediately wanted to see the video. In my head, I assumed there had to be a video.’’
Once the cobwebs cleared, Buckley realized there wasn’t going to be video from many angles the way there is at work at Toyota’s Technical Center (TCC) in Saline, Michigan.
At work, all crash videos are examined for weeks. It doesn’t work that way in the real world.
So there was Buckley, on hands and knees in the middle of a Michigan winter, trying to gauge how her car had reacted to the impact.
It’s the kind of behavior that creates a different kind of curiosity—that of law enforcement officials. So the police had some questions about her post-crash behavior.
“The most important aspect of engineering is asking questions,’’ Buckley says. “You’ll never have all the answers, but if you don’t ask the questions you can’t even start to figure it out.’’
The goal is incorporating safety into vehicles’ design.
She’s proud that the Sienna minivan, the first vehicle she worked on, got a five-star crash test rating from NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).
After that, Buckley worked on the current Tundra, and now she’s finishing work on a vehicle of huge importance to Toyota, the 2016 Toyota Tacoma pickup that’s getting a total redesign.
Her role: safety and crashworthiness pertaining to frontal impact.
That means her team is responsible for frontal crash regulations and designing a structure that keeps the occupants safe in a crash and earns good safety ratings.
“I know many people who drive Toyota trucks. The prospect of seeing my work directly benefiting the community that I’m involved with is incredibly rewarding,’’ she says.
Etc.
Good news for car buffs in Northern and Central Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire and Maine: the first issue of Whip’s Wheels should be in the mail (to subscribers) and in local auto parts stores this week. That’s a sure sign that good weather and the car show season is upon us … Herb Chambers is having his second Cars & Coffee event on Sat., May 9, at his Porsche and Audi dealership at 62 Cambridge St. in Burlington. While visitors’ cars take center stage, Chambers also plans to bring one from his personal collection, a Porsche 918 Spyder. It’s a limited edition, mid-engine, plug-in hybrid … Also on May 9, the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich is offering a behind-the-scenes tour of the 20 cars in its collection that aren’t on display. Call Julie Raynor at 508-888-3300 x175 to reserve a spot at the session with curator Jennifer Madden … Today, the keepers of my beloved El Caminos are gathering for a spring Dust-Off at 9:30 a.m. at Jimmy’s Pizza on Rte. 125 in North Andover. After breakfast comes a cruise along the Merrimack River with an ice cream stop at the renowned Hodgie’s in Amesbury. Word of advice: a “small’’ is actually extra large. Locals know that a normal-sized cone is called a “Quarter Kiddie.’’
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