The moment an EX90 going at 55 kilometres an hour hits another stopped EX90 in the side.Jonas Ingman @ Bruksbild/Courtesy of manufacturer
Even when you know it’s going to happen – under the spotlights right in front of you – it’s still a surprise.
When a car smashes into another car with more than 50 kilometres an hour of violence, there’s always going to be shock. A realization that something awful just happened and, for the passengers inside, there but for the grace of your God goes you.
Of course, at the Volvo safety grounds in Gothenburg, Sweden, this is just a test. It’s one of more than 200 physical tests that engineers perform here every year, each preceded by up to 150 virtual tests that prepare for the costly crunching of metal and spraying of broken glass. For those engineers, there’s no surprise. All the crash tests do is prove the computer modelling was correct. If there’s any deviation from how the computer program predicted everything would happen, then something went wrong. These days, that rarely happens.
This controlled test is, apparently, Volvo’s “first ever public crash test with three fully electric cars in a single sequence.” First, a Volvo EX90 drove head-on at a stationary EX90 at 50 kilometres an hour and stopped using its automatic emergency braking. Then shortly after, another EX90 drove into the side of the first vehicle at 55 kilometres an hour. Doors crumpled, airbags went off, the crash test dummies survived unscathed within the SUV’s cabin safety cage just as they would if they were real people. Volvo says the energy in the test was 30-per-cent more than is required in the most severe of standard side-impact testing. All very impressive.
But this isn’t why I was here. Volvo invited me to talk about a new seat belt it’s designed, so I can tell you about it. But you’re probably not that interested in a new seat belt, because in the ultra-competitive world of car marketing, safety only sells to a small percentage of people. Most drivers assume cars that pass their crash testing with five-star ratings are plenty safe enough, and the extra margin that Volvo builds in is probably unnecessary. Probably.
The scene after one EX90 crashed into the side of another at 55 kilometres an hour.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
In a survey last month, Volvo Canada found that while 81 per cent of the 1,500 Canadian respondents say their car-buying decisions are influenced by safety ratings, only 9 per cent consider safety to be their top purchase factor. Price was much more important, at 34 per cent. As well, while 61 per cent of Canadians aged 55 and older said they’re willing to pay more for advanced safety features, that drops to 44 per cent among Canadians younger than 55.
I’ve got to admit, my eyes glazed over during the hour-long presentation on the new seat belt, which Volvo calls a “multi-adaptive safety belt.” It will be fitted next year to the all-new EX60 SUV, and it’s designed to better accommodate as many as 11 body types and situations. Current Volvo seat belts adapt themselves to three body types: small, medium and large. As Volvo says in the press release: “In less than the blink of an eye, the car’s system analyses the unique characteristics of a crash – such as direction, speed and passenger posture – and shares that information with the safety belt. Based on this data, the system selects the most appropriate setting.”
Crash test dummies at the Volvo safety grounds in Gothenburg, Sweden.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
These days, everything is based on data. Volvo’s slogan is that “data is the new safety belt” and the maker goes to extraordinary lengths to collect relevant information. In the last 55 years, it’s accumulated data on some 50,000 crashes across Sweden, involving 80,000 injuries; when a Volvo crashes within an hour or so of Gothenburg, a Volvo safety team goes out to the site to analyze everything as thoroughly as possible. In Sweden, one in every five cars is a Volvo; here in Gothenburg, where the Geely-owned company is head-quartered, the ratio is even greater.
“If you don’t know the problem, your solution is a guess, at best,” says Mikael Ljung Aust, a behavioural scientist who is Volvo’s senior technical leader for collision prevention. Collecting the data and analyzing the crashes is “an extremely useful way to figure out why people end up in crashes. I’ve interviewed hundreds of drivers who crashed, on site, and not one of them expected to crash that day and they were all surprised in different ways.”
When Volvo crashes a car, it makes sure to collect a lot of data to see if the real crash goes the same as the virtual simulations.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Those interviews help to make sense of the enormous amount of data that’s now available in a car, and especially in a Volvo. There can be as many as 300 computers in a vehicle, each responsible for specific tasks, but the new EX90 has one, far more powerful, Superclass core computer that takes care of everything, says Aust. “We’re introducing external sensors that are beyond anything we had before. We have super-capable cameras, we’ve got radars, we even have a Lidar; super-capable sensors that help us see the outside world in a way that we haven’t seen it before.”
These sensors will work with the new seat belt to allow it to perform better – to reduce injuries from the belt creating too much tension or too little tension at any particular point on the body. It is, however, considerably more complex than existing belts, which already include more than 100 components in their mechanism, many of them moving parts. The new belt will include several hundred components and nobody at Volvo would say how much extra it will cost.
As well, nobody at Volvo would commit to saying if, or when, the new seat belt might be available in other models after next year’s introduction. That will probably depend on further testing and feedback data, and the system is still not perfect. In the crash test I witnessed, the first EX90 that drove itself head-on at the stationary car did not quite stop in time and they tapped their front bumpers. I was asked not to film that test, and in the video I was provided afterward, the two vehicles did not touch. I guess that’s why what I saw was claimed to be the first “public” test of such a situation.
This is why such physical testing occurs – to surprise the engineers and show that something wasn’t quite right in the computer calculations. Something went wrong. They take the new information and tweak the sensors and hope to eventually get it right, every time. With enough testing, a fatality becomes an injury, an injury becomes a bruise and a bruise becomes a non-existent incident. It takes considerable patience but they’re getting there, one crash at a time.
The writer was a guest of the automaker. Content was not subject to approval.