– Modern crash test dummies cost about $100,000 each, and every part of their construction is regulated by law. That’s a lot of effort and money – for an item (entity?) that exists only to be destroyed.

– In the past, crash tests and the like used corpses, animals, or even living people as experimental subjects. In some respects, the dummy is the proxy for the living being that should be killed or hurt – possibly for the guy who developed the modern dummy, a researcher who used himself as a subject for crash tests.

– tie-ins to Roswell and Nazi Germany, but the program’s still running.

Two possible artifacts:

– A dummy that’s survived test after test; it never seems to ‘die’. Now it acts as a protective artifact of sorts; drive with it your car, and you and the dummy will both escape unscathed. The cost, of course, is that the injuries don’t disappear; they’re just diverted to some other poor person.

– A dummy that’s a proxy for a person; injure that person, and you injure the dummy instead. But the dummy becomes self-aware by experiencing pain – and when it finally comes alive, it wants revenge…