Volvo has always been a synonym for safety and they’ve pretty much built safe cars as long as most of us can remember. In the recent years they took their safety concern to the next level with innovative safety systems and different approach to car building.
However that’s not the whole story, when all those systems fail, you basically rely on the metal around you, and that’s where Volvo has made a huge progress. Considering all of their advancements, their claim that it will be impossible to die in their cars made after 2020 seems believable.
In their safety center they presented the Volvo XC90 which uses all of their most advanced safety systems and features, and XC90, by the way, is considered as one of the safest production SUV’s.
Even though Volvo has impressive safety systems, we’ll leave that for some of our future articles, in this one we’ll focus on the their basic architecture, which is the only thing that prevents you from dying in case you get into an accident.
Their vision of completely safe car is basically a strong vehicle which is made out metals whose hardness level is different. This also means that they will be able to implement this approach to most of their vehicles. The car is composed out of 8 flexible and 1 fixed zones, and as you might have guessed, flexible zones are basically made to absorb all of the impact, while fixed zone is made from strongest metals and it is intended to protect the occupants.
For this job they used 5 different types of steel with different levels of hardness and aluminium. Logically aluminum is used in the crumple zones while steel is used in other areas. Cabin is made from the strongest steel and it is not supposed to deform in case of an impact.
Volvo’s dedication to safety is really impressive and they are putting their maximum effort to end traffic related deaths. When it is all said and done, and as we were able to witness from their test XC90, they are really on the top when it comes to safety. Even nowadays Volvo is building some of the safest cars on the planet, and there is no doubt that they will continue advancing.
