Volvo - Forefront of Safety Engineering !!!

Safety engineering of automobile has been all about R&D and innovation. The main purpose of developing safer car is the minimize occupants' injury or reduce fatality in an event of an accident.

Some of the innovative safety features available in the market now:

Toyota iQ's rear windscreen airbag

Ford's seatbelt airbag

About a month ago I help a friend of mine wrote his speech for his English presentation. It is about Volvo's safety development, where Volvo is famous for its historic reputation of safety.

Below is the essay for it which I found might be useful for students who would want to do the same topic in the future:

"VOLVO"

Volvo is a Swedish car manufacturer founded in 1927. Since then, Volvo had been very committed in safety engineering. That’s why Volvo has a good reputation in terms of safety of its cars.

Every time when you buckle up your seatbelt, does it remind you that the life-saving device is actually invented by Volvo? After the invention of seatbelt, Volvo has invented or installed other safety features such as airbags, Side Impact Protection System and City Safety. So, why Volvo cars are safer than other manufacturers’ cars? It is because of Volvo’s commitment to safety which we will discuss later.

Volvo Safety Centre

Volvo reputation on safety doesn’t come at a cheap price. Volvo spent millions on crash testing and crashed almost one hundred of cars per annum. Other than that, Volvo’s research and development department continues to develop better and safer features to be installed in their cars.

Volvo launched its new $81 million crash safety laboratory to provide data on frontal, offset and side collisions together with rollover test. The Volvo Safety Center is one of the world’s most advanced crash test facilities and is capable of modeling nearly every aspect of auto collisions both in physical and virtual environments.

Volvo also has 100 different crash-test dummies representing men, women and children of different sizes, weights and ages. There are different dummies used for different situations and different purpose. Volvo even made a pregnant dummy named Linda to analyse how to reduce injuries on pregnant woman in an event of a crash.

Pedestrian safety

The Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake feature detects pedestrians in front of the vehicle and automatically applies the car's full braking power if the driver fails to brake in time. This new technology should help the driver avoid collisions with pedestrians at speeds below 20kmh. If the car is being driven faster, the aim is to reduce the impact speed as much as possible. It will reduce the collision force by about 75 percent.

In an emergency situation, the driver first gets an audible warning together with a flashing light in the windscreen's head-up display that looks like a brake light in front of the vehicle. This is to warn and demand a reaction from driver to avoid the collision.

This shows that Volvo’s commitment to safety is not only to Volvo car buyers, but also for everybody else on the road.

Rollover Protection

Thanks to the extensive research in crash testing, Volvo is able to design safer car to reduce occupants’ injuries. Volvo is also aiming to produce zero-fatality car by the year 2020!

Dynamic Stability Traction Control (DSTC) and Roll Stability Control (RSC) have saved and are saving numerous drivers and their passengers from life endangering situations. Both systems are used to prevent rollover from happening. If a rollover is imminent, Rollover Protection System (ROPS) will protect the occupants by inflating the side airbags and tighten the seatbelts.

Roof strength is also an important factor in protecting the occupants in a rollover. High strength metal is used in the design of the roof support beams. These act as a safety cell preventing the roof from caving in on the passengers and keeping the cabin structurally safe.

Volvo S60