If by the land of bikes you mean Netherlands, then you’ve got TASS! They sometimes get to crash test odd things there like railway carriages, lamp posts, and they once accidentally fired a car into a tree. I’ve done a bit of work there in the past :-)

Anyway, the development of crash test dummies way back in the past used to be pretty random. There were wooden ones, some testing used wax dummies dropped from above with a pendulum, some low-speed testing had volunteers (there’s a video on youtube somewhere of one of them being handed a cigarette after the crash as the first order of business). When things started to get serious a lot of research was taken from military and aviation testing, but to bring things up to date the Thor dummy was built from the ground-up to be for car testing … with that they looked at injury statistics and decided what sensors to put in. It was made with analog instrumentation (with hundreds of cables coming out, looking vaguely like something from a cyberpunk anime) with the intention to fit onboard computers to it when technology was sufficiently advanced. Now all the data recording is handled in-dummy with it’s own battery so if a cable gets cut the data isn’t lost.

The new female Thor has a much better spine / abdomen, with gel-filled pressure sensors which were originally developed by the French government to go in child dummies. Compared to the male version it’ll give much more meaningful information about abdominal injuries, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one!