Volvo Cars marks 60 years of sharing safety knowledge with open-for-all digital library
Volvo Cars is for the first time making its safety knowledge accessible to the public in a central digital library it is urging the car industry to use, “in the interest of safer roads for all,” the company stated.
Sixty years ago, the automaker invented the three-point safety belt, which is estimated to have saved more than one million lives globally, not just in Volvos but in numerous other cars, “due to the automaker’s decision to share the invention in the interest of improving traffic safety.”
To celebrate this milestone and to underline that its sharing tradition goes beyond patents and physical products, Volvo Cars now launches Project E.V.A. The initiative embodies and celebrates 60 years-worth of sharing research into car safety with the world, but also highlights a fundamental issue with inequality in terms of car safety development.
“We have data on tens of thousands of real-life accidents, to help ensure our cars are as safe as they can be for what happens in real traffic,” said Lotta Jakobsson, professor and senior technical specialist at Volvo Cars Safety Centre.
“This means our cars are developed with the aim to protect all people, regardless of gender, height, shape or weight, beyond the ‘average person’ represented by crash test dummies,” Jakobsson said.
Project E.V.A. illustrates, based on Volvo Cars’ own research data as well as several other studies, that women are more at risk for some injuries in a car crash. Differences in for example anatomy and neck strength between the average man and woman mean that women are more likely to suffer from whiplash injuries.
Based on those studies and its own crash data, Volvo Cars created virtual crash test dummies to better understand these accidents and develop safety technologies that helps to protect both men and women in an equal way.
