Gothenburg/Sweden: The destruction of the orange sedan with its slapdash paintwork may have been intentional but it was far from wanton. It was all part of Volvo’s bid to create an injury-proof car by 2020.

While that vehicle of the future may lack the self-awareness of the crimefighting Trans Am in 1980s TV series Knight Rider, experts say it will be able to steer, brake and find out about the road ahead from within a vast electronic bumper.

And if all goes according to plan, its driver and passengers will escape even the most serious crash unhurt.

Volvo is far from the only player in what Claes Tingvall, the Swedish road administration’s head of traffic safety, calls the biggest revolution in the auto industry since the seatbelt.

Automakers, parts suppliers, governments and global agencies from the United Nations to the OECD are all looking at ways to relegate to memory the roughly 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes each year.

But in what some analysts see as a bid to hold its lead in consumer perceptions of safety, the Swedish carmaker now owned by Ford is the first to set a target date to eliminate death and injury in its cars.

“I think if you look into the future,we as a community will not accept that we have injuries,” said Jan Ivarsson, leader of the Volvo safety team with specialists in everything from biomechanics to engineering to behavioural science.

While Volvo is working on pedestrian safety as well, the 2020 goal centres on those inside its vehicles.

Tingvall, who is a force behind the Swedish government’s own plan to stop traffic deaths through better infrastructure, doubts Volvo’s target is fully achievable but said even a tenfold reduction in injury rates would yield dramatic benefits.

Borrowing principles from industries like aviation, the matrix of systems Volvo and other carmakers are working on will interact to start crash prevention and mitigation hours, rather than milliseconds, before impact.

The Gothenburg complex’s moveable crash block and two 150-metre tunnels, including the only rotating test tunnel in the industry, allow Volvo to simulate everything from a head-on smash into a bus stop to a 90-degree vehicle-to-vehicle impact.

The 20-member safety team also gathers real-world data from governments, insurance firms and, with a crash-site unit on 24-7 call, conducts its own field investigations into the causes of collisions and how they could have been prevented. The car of the future will have even more foresight.

Radar, sonar and other sensors will extend its so-called “deformation zone” until it becomes, in essence, a huge electronic bumper reaching out on all sides to gather information to feed back to the vehicle.

In a crash situation, where many drivers freeze, the car will be able to take over and steer or brake on its own. Reducing pre-impact speed by 15 km an hour would halve the road-death rate, according to Tingvall, so self-braking is key. In the very long run,Volvo’s Ivarsson said,we may all drive the ultimate vehicle: the uncrashable car.

Source : DNA