Volvo goes 'beyond' five stars

As the majority of new cars achieve five-star ratings for crash protection, Volvo, the brand synonymous with safety long before it was in vogue, is urging car buyers to look beyond the simple scoring system.

The safety authority NCAP in Europe and Australia is overhauling its rating system to make it more difficult for cars to achieve top marks – but even that may not be enough to distinguish the differences in vehicle safety, says Volvo expert Thomas Broberg.

While praising the independent watchdog NCAP for its efforts in improving overall vehicle safety over the past decade, he told motoring.com.au: "We're not saying getting five stars are not important. It is … but at the end of the day what we're doing is beyond five stars. We have quite an ambitious vision for our future. We base our customer needs on very thorough studies of real world accidents."

When asked if Volvo felt its reputation for safety had been diluted because so many other brands now achieve five-star ratings, he said: "On the contrary - it's recognition that what we did for years is right.
In that sense we welcome competition, looking at real world accidents …. and how cars have actually become better, it's extremely good that competition is catching up.

"We see in surveys that our brand reputation is still very strong. We feel we give our customers a unique offering when it comes to safety."

He said Volvo has introduced new safety systems in its cars even though it does not currently get any extra 'points' for it in NCAP testing.
The best example, he said, was the City Safety system introduced in 2008, which prevents nose-to-tail crashes below 30km/h and can now also detect pedestrians. (Broberg is one of five engineers nominated on the patent for the City Safety).

"When we did our predictions we estimated [a reduction of nose-to-tail crashes] somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent using European and Swedish data. So we were not that surprised [to learn that US authorities noted a 25 per cent reduction in crashes among cars equipped with the system].

"[City Safety] is not saving every situation, it's designed for specific situations. These numbers [of reductions] are extremely high. There are a lot of other things we do that have much less affect.

"It's a step by step process we have to address the issue in road safety. We're grinding it down."

He said pedestrian safety is another area where big gains can be made. In most countries, including Australia, pedestrian fatalities are measured in the road death toll.

"The risk of injury is so high when pedestrians are involved," says Broberg. "If we can get the speed down from 50km/h to 25km/h then we can save a lot of lives."

Broberg praised NCAP's decision to include and measure crash avoidance technology in the future – but warned the effectiveness of each system should be tested, not simply given an arbitrary score for simply having the equipment.

"They need to do some kind of physical testing against objects in different situations," he said. "What's good with collision avoidance technology is that you can have non-destructive tests so you can re-use the car [unlike crash protection tests which destroy the car in one hit].

"The difficulty however is to understand how the scenarios should be played out and also how the targets should look. Hopefully they will find a good solution that recognises the differences in the effectiveness of the systems."

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