The “zero fatality” pledge made by Volvo is well on the way according to Volvo Cars safety centre acting senior director, Jan Ivarsson, CarAdvice reports. Technology will be the way forward in attaining this goal. “We put this together in 2007 to 2008, and it was also communicated outside the company, and this is very precise and easy to understand direction,” Ivarsson said of the pledge.
It was also revealed that at the start, there was some struggle in trying to actually work towards such a goal. “In the beginning it was a lot of fuss about it, in terms of, you know, how can you do it? But we needed to refresh our leadership – being number one over the years, you need to do something different,” he said.
Despite that, Ivarsson noted that the company has “a lot of research in place” to support this goal. “We have customer data from collision avoidance, and normal driving and for crashes as well. Now we are deploying over the years, year by year, we are introducing new functions like we’ve done with XC90,” he disclosed.
He further elaborated on the safety functions which will play a part in fulfilling the pledge. These include the left turn detection – which was first in the world, along with run off-road mitigation. Meanwhile, he also touched on Pilot Assist systems, which helps put the burden off from the driver.
“We also introduced Pilot Assist in our cars, and that is having more safe lateral position and also relieve the work load on the driver both in the lateral in the longitudinal directions, so you have less collisions, less injuries and you will have less drifting off road and in the other direction, in the course of traffic,” Ivarsson said of the system.
He concluded that the brand will launch more technologies in the future to achieve this. “It’s a vision, talking about fatalities and serious injuries by 2020 we should have no-one killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car. That is our vision forward,” the chief declared, adding that the goal has been the guiding direction from upper management to “the guys doing the drawings.”
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