Motoring Blog

Nearly all current vehicles offer good safety features, but since seat belts and airbags have become standard, nothing more in terms of improving safety has really been attempted. However, Volvo, always renowned among car manufacturers for car safety, is planning to make injury proof vehicles by 2020.

It’s not hard to guess that the reason for this is the number of car related accidents. With the number of new drivers increasing, so does the number of accidents. Volvo, which now belongs to Ford, is doing even more research in this area and has found that key to injury proof cars is to find a way to make brakes function automatically during the pre-accident time.

This is especially important given that most drivers “freeze” and are unable to do something during an accident, and the so called next-generation of brakes will make the car to stop on its own. Here’s what WIRED reports.

Volvo recently invited Reuters to watch an S80 test mule get its nose flattened at 35 mph by an 850-ton steel-clad block in a carefully choreographed collision that took one-tenth of a second to transpire, but two weeks to set up and another two to dissect. Engineers shot the smashup from almost as many angles as the Super Bowl and even put a camera in a glass-topped pit to record it from below. Sensors on the car, the crash block and two male “biomechanical measurement devices” – what the rest of us call crash test dummies – collected terabytes of data.

Any car manufacturer that considers improving safety as important — if not more so — that acceleration or speed has got to be welcomed. Good job Volvo.

Photo: © morberg

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