I felt like a little kid. I had just rammed into a parked vehicle and, it was so much fun, I was now lining up to do it again. Wham!
Actually, there was no harm done because we were at Volvo’s test track in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the "car" we were ramming was an inflatable dummy. My hosts were Jonas Ekmark and Jochen Pohl of Volvo’s active safety group, which had two new technologies to showcase.
The world has more than one million vehicle-related deaths annually, they pointed out, and maybe 10 times that many serious injuries. Only 90,000 deaths occur annually in the U.S. and Europe combined, suggesting the Third World faces significant safety hurdles. By far the majority of accidents are caused by human error, followed by the traffic environment and problems with the vehicle itself.
Sweden itself has only 500 annual traffic deaths, which works out to 6.7 per 100,000 drivers (half the U.S. rate). Sweden has also adopted a zero-fatality goal, which contrasts rather sharply with the U.S. benchmark of a 33 percent reduction by 2008.
"We want to reduce fatalities to 250 by 2012 and we think it is an achievable goal," says Jan Olsson of Swedish company Autoliv, a pioneer in pedestrian safety systems, brake assist and night-vision equipment.
As Volvo (the company that introduced three-point seatbelts in 1959) will be happy to remind you, its cars are among the safest on the world’s roads. The cars feature a plethora of passive safety features, including tough steel cage construction, multiple airbags, inflatable side curtains, dynamic stability traction control, as well as whiplash and rollover protection.
The next step is active safety, where cars can "talk" to other cars and communicate with their surroundings. Among the new ideas advancing at Volvo are: four-point seatbelts with pretensioners, which take up the slack in the belts when a frontal collision occurs; brake assist, which increases brake pressure in emergency situations; and a host of electronic "telematic" features.
That’s where the test track came in. We were trying out Volvo’s new radar-based adaptive cruise control (ACC), which links the driver’s speed to the car ahead. If the driver ignores warnings and prepares to plow into the back of another vehicle, ACC slams on the brakes. So we hit that blue dummy vehicle several times and each time our Volvo wagon corrected our foolhardiness and applied the brakes just before impact. We were moving at 43 mph approaching the target, but slowed to just 21 before getting into our "accident."
The second system we tested was a lane departure warning that uses a camera to read lane markings and reacts instantly (gently tugging the seat belt harness) if the driver, without benefit of a turn signal, starts to move off to the edge of the road. The system worked exactly as advertised, producing a big grin from Pohl. Volvo is showing off another version of this technology in its full-scale Safety Concept Truck: Its camera reads the driver’s face, not the road, to detect eye-closings and drowsiness. Since sleepiness causes 1.5 million accidents annually in the U.S. alone, such systems would likely save many lives.
As it happened, the week I came back from Sweden I spent time in the 390-horsepower, $91,395 Jaguar Super V-8 sedan. Fortunately, it also has an early ACC system and I was able to demonstrate its effectiveness on I-95. It really doesn’t want you to hit the car in front, beeping like mad before it goes for the brakes. Not idiot-proof, maybe, but effective.
