For the first time, Volvo Cars is making its safety knowledge easily accessible in a central digital library which it urges the car industry to use, in the interest of safer roads for all.
The announcement strengthens the company’s philosophy of boosting safety through knowledge sharing and helping save lives. The opening of the digital library also comes in time for the 60-year anniversary of what may have been the most important invention in the history of automotive safety, the three-point safety belt.
Faisal Sharif, Managing Director of DOMASCO, the exclusive distributer of Volvo Cars in Qatar, said that Volvo possesses unrivalled safety credibility and is renowned for its contributions to societal progress.
For decades, new safety technologies have developed in the Volvo Cars Safety Center to ensure that cars are as safe as they can be for what happens in real traffic. The tests go beyond the ‘average person’ represented by crash test dummies, and are enhanced to protect all people, regardless of gender, height, shape or weight.
Project EVA initiative embodies the sharing tradition of Volvo and helps improve traffic safety for everyone. We are proud to be Volvo’s partner in Qatar and provide our customers with the safest cars on the road.’
Introduced by Volvo Cars in 1959, the three-point safety belt is estimated to have saved over one million lives globally, and not just drivers of Volvo cars but in numerous other cars as well, thanks to the company’s decision to share the invention in the interest of improving traffic safety. It has, since then, continued to prioritise societal progress over financial gain alone.
To celebrate the milestone and to underline that its sharing tradition goes beyond patents and physical products, Volvo Cars launched Project EVA, to celebrate 60 years’ worth of research into car safety, and to highlight a fundamental issue with inequality in terms of car safety development.
Safety and Project EVA
Project EVA illustrates, based on Volvo Cars’ own research data as well as several other studies, that women are more at risk for injuries in a car crash. Differences in anatomy and neck strength between the average man and woman mean that women are more likely to suffer from whiplash injuries.
Based on studies and its own crash data, Volvo Cars created virtual crash test dummies to better understand these accidents and develop safety technologies that helps protect both men and women in an equal way. The first resulting technology was WHIPS -whiplash protection introduced in 1998 – that has contributed to the unique look of Volvo seats and head restraints.
The idea of prioritising societal progress still drives Volvo Cars’ safety development work. It develops new technology not to only meet safety standards or pass regulatory tests, but because its own research data, based on close analyses of tens of thousands of real-life accidents, show where safety can be improved.
In the 1980s, Volvo Cars started to focus on side impacts, after its data showed that too many people were injured in such accidents due to the short distance between impact and occupant. This resulted in several innovations starting in the 1990s, such as the side impact protection system (SIPS), side airbags and inflatable curtains. All these innovations, based on Volvo’s research data, now form an industry standard.
More recently, Volvo Cars’s research data showed an issue with lumbar spine, or lower back, injuries across all people, regardless of gender and size. Further analyses and study made Volvo focus on the dangers of run-off road injuries. The resulting technology, introduced first on the XC90 and now on all SPA-based cars, is an energy absorber in the seats that goes far beyond what is a regulatory requirement for car makers.
For updates and more information about Volvo cars available in Qatar, visit volvocars.com.
Related Link:
https://www.marhaba.qa/volvo-cars-making-driving-safer-for-everyone/
