WITTMAN, Arizona
Each year, 1.2 million people worldwide, including some 43,000 Americans, die on the roadways. To put those numbers in perspective: 1.2 million people is the population of Dallas, Texas… eliminated each year; Forty-three thousand is the capacity of Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians… wiped out on the highway year after year after…
A problem? More like an epidemic.
But Volvo, the car company that invented the life-saving seat belt, that car company already so well known for safety, has a new goal: By the year 2020, Volvo’s vision to produce vehicles in which no one will be killed or injured.
No, you didn’t misread that. “Our vision is that by 2020 no one will be killed or injured in a Volvo,” is what it says on the slide being projected onto the screen here at Volvo’s Arizona Proving Grounds northwest of Phoenix.
Thomas Broberg, Volvo senior technical advisor for safety (and Ph.D candidate at MIT), reads those words aloud for emphasis, and then adds his own in behalf of his employer: “You should not risk life and limb transporting yourself to work or to school.”
Imagine: Cars that prevent their occupants from being killed or even injured! An impossible goal? Perhaps. But the folks at Volvo hold it as their goal, and they’re working toward it very seriously. And it’s not only those inside Volvos they want to protect. They’ve already found ways to eliminate some collisions between their own cars and those of other brands, and they’re working on ways to keep pedestrians and cyclists from falling victim to vehicles as well.
In the next few days, Volvo will show its latest safety technologies to officials from governmental and insurance groups. Today, it did a pre-run with some Phoenix-area automotive writers, first explaining an alphabet soup of safety of that goes beyond ABS and ESP to include LDW, DAC, ACC, CWAB and much more. Then, we left the classroom and went out on the pavement for behind-the-wheel demonstrations.
In one of those demonstrations, Volvo showed us the City Safety technology that will be launched as standard equipment on the 2009 Volvo XC60. City Safety is a low-speed collision mitigation system designed to avoid, or at least mitigate, a collision between a Volvo and the vehicle just ahead.
Basically, we were put in a car and told to drive at about 15 miles per hour toward what appeared to be the rear end of a big blue car (actually, it was an air-filled, canvas-covered balloon). As we approached, lights and sound warned of an impending collision. Stand on the brakes and the car stops. No harm, no foul.
But even if the driver fails to respond quickly enough, the car applies its own brakes and the impact, if it even occurs, is scratch-and-dent, not the typical--but expensive--fender-bender.
We also got to leave the proving grounds to experience some other Volvo safety technologies in real-world traffic, systems that warn you that you’re about to cross a lane marker and perhaps leave the road or cross into on-coming traffic, that are designed to alert the drowsy driver should he or she start wandering back and forth within the lane, that help the driver keep a safe distance between vehicles at highway speeds, even Alcoguard, a portable breathalyzer device that reads the driver’s blood alcohol level and can prevent the car from starting.
Many of these systems already are available on Volvo vehicles. So is another one that I experienced unexpectedly when two dogs ran out of the brush in front of me. I made an emergency stop and then realized that my four-way flashers were flashing even though I hadn’t touched the red triangle switch on the dashboard.
Turns out that they come on automatically in such a situation, to alert drivers behind that you’ve stopped unexpectedly.
Very clever, these safety-conscious Swedish engineers.
Let’s hope that Volvo meets its 2020 goal, and that just like the seat belt, it shares its safety systems with other car companies.
--Larry Edsall