What the Car Industry Can Do, Volvo Cars

Abstract

Motor vehicle manufacturers have a central and a very important role in reaching the target of zero fatalities and serious injuries in road traffic. Although the continuous development of safer products has made a significant contribution in reducing the number of casualties, the responsibility still remains profoundly with motor vehicle manufacturers in continuing the process of protecting car occupants and not harming other road users. However, the possible contributions do not end here. Sharing research data based on real-life traffic crashes and incident experiences, cooperating with other traffic safety stakeholders, and sharing real-time data on traffic information with authorities and other road users also have a role to play in reducing the number of road casualties. In addition to this, motor vehicle manufacturers will be able to contribute by assuming the corporate social responsibility in using safe transportation linked to producing vehicles, parts, and services and sharing the latest level of technology advancement with customers in countries without government mandates on safety.

It is important to stress that all these efforts need to have a global perspective. For the vehicle manufacturers, this implies that all the technical developments in motor vehicle safety, collaborating with governments and sharing knowledge on safety, must be performed and available also in parts of the world with a vehicle fleet of traditionally lower advancement levels.

In line with the efforts of reaching zero fatalities, Volvo Cars has defined its own Safety Vision. This states that no one is to be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo vehicle.

The aim here is to share the view of Volvo Cars on the possible contributions and actions of motor vehicle manufacturers in the collaborative efforts of reaching towards zero fatalities and serious injuries within the road transportation sector.

Anders Eugensson has retired.

Introduction and Background

Traditionally, cars have, ever since the launch of the first volume selling motor vehicles in the 1920s, been designed, built, and used to fit a generic traffic situation using an infrastructure that has gradually been developed with the mind and purpose to fit and encompass all road users and only slowly adapted to manage an increased, denser, and more intense traffic situation. This infrastructure did not, however, develop in a way needed in order to keep up with all the challenges of modern traffic in terms of pace, density, and traffic mix which has resulted in a continuous increase in the number of traffic casualties.

In addition to this, car manufacturers have viewed themselves as providers of consumer products that primarily needed to meet the customers’ expectations with respect to comfort, speed, styling, and economy. Besides meeting the government standards, safety was not a prioritized area of development and not considered to be a unique selling point in customers’ buying decisions.

However, this has radically changed during the last 20–30 years. Car manufacturers have realized that they are part of a bigger picture and being part of a transportation and societal structure that is more than just putting cars on the road. This was, however, not only forced upon them but was also a realization that their products not only did a very important task of transporting people and goods for the benefit of the society and supporting the civilization that modern people have gotten to know and become adjusted to but also created major challenges when it comes to increasing traffic casualties, major health problems due to air pollutions and stress, congestions, and unhealthy and unpleasant local environments. This also became very obvious in the early 1970s when traffic casualties escalated up to a level that was totally unacceptable both from the perspective of the society and its citizens. At the same time, the first government safety standards were issued, both in the USA and in Europe. Well-known obvious failures of car designs with resulting catastrophic consequences and major headlines gave rise to the creation of consumer groups pushing for safety and major safety recalls for repairing the unsafe products. Gradually this created a new way of looking at road traffic safety in that it needs a holistic perspective and more involvement of all stakeholders, including governments, vehicle manufacturers, consumer groups, insurance companies, road authorities, and academia. At the same time, more focus on safety evolved from customers supported by comprehensive and objective consumer information. The information was provided by a number of actors such as governments, insurance institutes, academia, motorist organizations, and consumer organizations. This type of consumer ratings gradually grew in importance and is now extensively used in the advertising for sales of new motor vehicles and has proven to be a useful tool for customers in their car-buying decision-making.

The development of safer motor vehicles has made a steady progress during the last 30 years and has today reached an impressive level of performance of protecting occupants. However, although the vehicles offer an elevated level of safety, parts of this performance do depend on the proper usage and behavior with respect to proper positioning and seating positions, usage of restraints, loading, number of occupants, vehicle modifications, and avoiding violations such as driving while under influence, speeding, and other traffic misbehaviors.

The modern motor vehicles do act in many ways in making road traffic safe and protecting occupants and other road users. New technologies in the form of systems helping and supporting the driver’s handling of the vehicles, navigation and information systems aiding drivers to navigate and stay comfortable and with less pressure, stability systems assisting drivers in handling conflict situations, lateral and longitudinal support of the driving, automatically acting systems that autonomously brake or keep a safe distance to other vehicles, drowsiness and distraction alert systems, and drunk-driving interlock systems have been developed.

In parallel to the increased activity of manufacturers to improve motor vehicle safety there have been extensive activities and efforts by governments and policymakers to reduce the number of road casualties globally. The estimated present level of fatalities in the world today (2019) is around 1.3 million people. A large proportion of this occurs in the low- and middle-income countries, and a large number of these are unprotected road users. It is estimated that 90% of the fatalities occur in the middle- or low-income countries globally (World Bank 2015).

Fig. 1

Road deaths per 100,000 in 2000 and 2015 (World Bank 2015)

Fig. 2

Share of worldwide road traffic deaths (%) (World Bank 2015)

Among the governments or policymakers run efforts is the Swedish Vision Zero policy which has been the role model for many other government initiatives ever since it was adopted in 1997.

In parallel to the government run safety initiatives, there are a number of anticipated major shifts in the different ways of being mobile, e.g., mobility as a service and ride-sharing. These will use different variations of more professional drivers, and ultimately there will be self-driven vehicles having an elevated level of safe driving incorporated into the core of the vehicles and are expected almost to eliminate the human error factor in the cause of traffic incidents and accidents.

In conclusion, many initiatives, both by governments and policymakers, are on-going or planned, the motor vehicle manufacturers are making impressive progress with improving the safety performance of their products, and significant progress has been made with reshaping the infrastructure in many parts of the world. The potential for this to be distributed globally and having an outcome closer to the Vision Zero goal is significant and encouraging.

Traffic Safety Improvements: Past and Present

For the first decades after the beginning of the era of producing vehicles for mass consumption, no significant progress was made towards improving motor vehicle safety. During this era, traffic casualties were considered to be part of the picture of road transportation and something that had to be accepted.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the car industry focused mainly on impressive car designs, engine sizes, and speed. The American style of extravagant fins and lots of chrome peaked late in the shift between the 1950s and 1960s, but still, the focus was on other things than road safety. However, the most significant safety innovation of all times, the three-point safety belt, was engineered during this era. It was first introduced in series production by Volvo in 1959. Volvo also waived its patent on this restraint, opening up for a mass introduction in passenger vehicles which was to enable a significant reduction in traffic casualties. Alas, both the customer acceptance and the penetration of this important innovation were amazingly slow. Also, governments were slow in mandating both to equip the vehicles with the restraint and to introduce occupant belt usage requirements. In some countries, mandating belt use in the front seats did not occur until the mid- to late 1980s, and mandating rear seat belt usage on a broader scale did not occur until a decade later. Mandating the equipment of three-point seat belts for all occupant positions is still not the case for all markets.

Early in the 1970s, with the traffic casualties reaching staggering numbers, governments, car manufacturers, and the general public started to realize that this was not a sustainable development. With increasing numbers and increasing speed performance of the vehicles, if drastic measures were not taken, the projections of casualties for the next decades were abominable and simply unacceptable.

As stated earlier, governments started both to establish agencies dedicated to traffic safety and to create the first set of safety standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The US federal safety agency National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was established in 1970 and its first set of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) the same year. In 1966, before the creation of NHTSA, another federal agency National Traffic Safety Agency, under the leadership of its first administrator Dr. William Haddon Jr., pushed for a more scientifically driven approach for reducing traffic casualties. Dr. Haddon created the concept of the Haddon Matrix which is looking at all factors – human, vehicle, and environmental factors – and pre-crash, crash, and post-crash interventions as a systematic strategy for cutting the number of injuries and fatalities in traffic.

Realizing the potential in exploring the possibilities of new safety innovations, NHTSA initiated the first global biannual safety conference named ESV (Experimental Safety Vehicles) in 1971. (In 1994 the name was changed to Enhanced Safety of Vehicles.) The focus here was to display vehicle safety concepts aimed for a later implementation in series production of vehicles.

As described in previous chapters, by the first years in the new millennium, the number of traffic casualties in the high-income countries in the world had been drastically reduced. The concept of reaching for zero casualties in the transportation sector was first introduced in Sweden in the mid-1990s. In 1997, the Swedish Parliament adopted the Vision Zero strategic principles as the aim and target for the efforts for the further efforts on improving traffic safety in Sweden. The Vision Zero plan, adopted by the Parliament, stated targets of reduced traffic casualties that have gradually been updated with time, but the plan with its principles has been successful in drastically reducing the number of fatalities and serious injuries in Swedish traffic and has become a model for many other government initiatives ever since it was adopted.

When introduced, the Swedish Vision Zero strategy was considered as a paradigm shift in that it transferred the focus from reducing the number of accidents to reducing the number traffic casualties and that traffic efficiency should not be in the way of reducing traffic casualties.

The number of traffic deaths in Sweden peaked during the period 1965–1970 with approximately 1300 fatalities, which means around 16 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants. In the 1970s and 1980s, significant efforts were made, both by the authorities, manufacturers, infrastructure owners, and other stakeholders, to reduce the number of fatalities by initiating more cooperation, collecting and sharing data, and applying more of a holistic approach. By mid-1990s, the annual fatalities had been lowered to around 500. At the same time, the number of vehicles and the number of vehicle kilometers travelled had increased significantly.

These results were, however, still neither acceptable nor satisfactory. In 1996, the Swedish Road Administration (Trafikverket) presented its proposal for a Vision Zero, i.e., a vision that is stating that nothing else than zero fatalities should be the long-term target. In 1997, the Swedish Parliament adopted the plan for Vision Zero, and in 1998, it adopted a target of half the maximum number of fatalities by 2007 as compared to 1997. This would result in a maximum number of fatalities of 270 per year. Although this number was not met for the first decade, a new target of 220 fatalities by 2020 was adopted by the Swedish Parliament in 2008. In 2019, the number of fatalities was 223, i.e., close to the target set in 2008 and a significant reduction. The next step would be another halving of the number which would mean around 110 fatalities per year by the year 2030.

Fig. 3

Road fatalities in Sweden, 2010–2019 (National Swedish Road statistics, Transportstyrelsen (2020))

The achievement of getting close to the target of halving the road deaths is remarkable considering that the economy is booming again, and the effects of the level of economy can clearly be seen when looking at the fatality numbers.

The numbers of fatalities dropped dramatically for the years 2009–2010 which coincided with the global economic problems.

When analyzing the ratio of fatalities to the vehicle kilometers travelled, the result shows a reduction of around 5% fatalities per year which is indeed significant and must, in many ways, be considered to be an undisputable advancement of traffic safety in Sweden.

The figure below shows the relationship between the road fatalities and the number of driven vehicle kilometers. Although the available statistics does not cover the last decade, the results clearly show the value of having strong visions for the strategic work on traffic safety.

The ratio between the number of fatalities and 100,000 inhabitants is around 2.6 which is one of the lowest worldwide.

Much of this effort was linked to infrastructure improvements. By shifting the focus from avoiding crashes to reducing personal injuries, infrastructure measures such as replacing crossings by roundabouts and installing median fences on highways and creating so-called 2 + 1 roads, i.e., roads where there is an interchange between having two or one lanes in each direction, have proven to be highly effective in reducing personal injuries.

In parallel to the infrastructure improvements, the performance of the vehicles’ occupant safety was considerably improved. In Sweden, a vehicle fleet with a high level of occupant protection has had a significant impact on lowering the reducing the number of fatalities and serious injuries.

What is still causing a concern is that some types of fatal crashes, such as bicycle and motorcycle crashes, do not show the same trend of dropping in numbers.

Fig. 4

Ratio of number of fatalities to vehicle km travelled in Sweden (Brude 2012)

In addition to the Swedish Vision Zero, there are a number of initiatives to reduce the number of fatalities globally. Among those is the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020 which is adopting a global perspective and inviting all stakeholders into these efforts. Although the number of fatalities continue to rise globally, it can be assumed that the effects of these initiatives will make a clear footprint in the years to come.

After the peak of the number of traffic casualties in the high-income countries worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s, this has considerably and steadily declined, due to various measures, during the last decades. However, the global number of traffic fatalities and the number of injuries have steadily risen and are by 2019 estimated to be around 1.3 million fatalities and 50 million serious injuries.

So, in spite of the considerable efforts made by governments, policymakers, and vehicle manufacturers, the staggering levels of traffic casualties globally are continuing to rise. There are also other factors preventing a more successful reduction of casualties. One important factor is the status of the global economy which influences the travel distances (vehicle km or vehicle miles travelled, vkmt or vmt) which clearly influence the number of road casualties.

Obviously, all this is unacceptable.

Swedish Vision Zero from an Industry Perspective

Volvo Cars believes that the Swedish Vision Zero is one of the most profound groundbreaking principles for adopting a human approach to a sector where earlier intolerable levels of casualties and human suffering were accepted more or less as a fact and almost as the cost we had to accept to keep up the levels of transportation for a modern society.

By basing the Vision on the criteria based on human tolerances, i.e., that small mistakes should not lead to serious consequences and that all stakeholders must be involved in the process of creating a safe road environment, this creates an earlier unforeseen possibility to come to terms with the unacceptable levels of human suffering.

The approach of the Swedish Vision Zero has been one of the guiding principles for the company when setting the goals for the Volvo Cars Safety Strategy.

Already when the company was founded in 1927, it was stated that, since cars are driven by people, the focus therefore must be safety. Setting the targets according to the human tolerances was therefore to be the guiding principle. This is also adopted in the Swedish Vision Zero strategy.

With establishment of the Swedish Vision Zero, this gave the company more support for its endeavors for pushing the limits of motor vehicle safety. It also gave more support within the company that the adopted long-term strategy was the correct one. Another outcome was that it also opened up for a more strategic cooperation with the Swedish government on the basis that by sharing a vision for zero fatalities and serious injuries, a foundation was established for joining forces towards reaching this goal. More about this cooperation will follow in a later chapter.

Using the Swedish Vision Zero as a role model, a number of countries have established their own Vision Zero targets. This includes many of the European countries, the European Commission, many of the states in the USA, and many other countries globally. This in turn gives the industry clearer guidance on the way forward and the principles for the role of the industry in their efforts for improving road safety.

Volvo Cars believes that the Swedish Vision Zero has established both a mind-set and the tools for enabling reaching the goal of zero deaths and serious injuries. This has proven to be invaluable and will be the best support for the future in removing the unacceptable consequences of an unsafely designed road system.

The Roles and Responsibilities of Car Manufacturers for Improving Traffic Safety

As discussed in the previous chapter, the major and primary responsibility of a motor vehicle manufacturer is to produce safe products, products that will protect occupants and vulnerable road users to a high level and to what is technically and economically feasible. The focus must always be to work towards real-life safety for occupants regardless of size, age, and gender. For in-vehicle occupants, the primary focus must be to optimize safety for those who are using the vehicle’s restraints and are not violating any traffic rules and regulations, e.g., not speeding and not driving while under the influence and that are belted. However, to the extent possible, protection should be offered for all occupants if this does not impede the protection of other occupants. Strong encouragements and efforts should also be given to having occupants act in the proper manner. Seat belt reminders, alcohol detection and interlocks, and speed limiters are effective measures available that need to be offered to the car-buying customers.

However, the responsibilities of the manufacturers do not end with producing safe cars. Car manufacturers have an important role to play also when it comes to assuming their social responsibility for making sure that all the activities related to manufacturing, transportation of goods, service purchasing, and employee road travels on official business are made with a level of safety that is in line with the targets of eliminating road casualties. In practice this means that manufacturers have an opportunity to influence and set requirements on such activities as safety requirements on the vehicles for goods transports to factory facilities and supplier practices for safe transportations. The safety requirements on the goods vehicles could be, e.g., requiring measures for the protection of vulnerable road users, requiring speed limiters on delivery vehicles and trucks, belt reminders, and drunk-driving prevention measures in all vehicles.

In preparing for the 2020 UN Third Ministerial Conference on Road Safety: Saving Lives beyond 2020, The Next Steps, that is to be held in Stockholm in February 2020, a report of the Academic Expert Group has listed a number of recommendations for Stockholm Declaration that is to be the legacy of this conference. Recommendation number one discusses “Sustainable practices and reporting” and what policies and practices manufacturers, businesses, and enterprises should include both in their internal activities and also applied in the processes and policies of the full range of suppliers, distributors, and partners throughout their value chain or production and distribution system.

In the continuous process of designing and producing new car models and constantly improving safety, manufacturers are recording and gathering data from crashes and incidents that are in turn used to improve the next development of car design. Some manufacturers also go beyond this and carry out their own crash investigations and do detailed analysis including time histories and follow-up medical records of the involved persons in the accident. This means that extensive knowledge is available that may be used as a base for the good of the motor vehicle safety community.

Manufacturers have an obligation to share knowledge on how their products affect the well-being of any one exposed to the risks linked to transportation. A lot of data may be shared without violating antitrust laws or exposing company intellectual properties or infringing on the privacy of the individuals involved.

Manufacturers are encouraged to work with governments, authorities, academia, and other organizations in establishing research platforms for moving safety forward. These platforms or cooperations will offer the opportunity to create a more holistic view on how to move traffic safety forward. Many of those cooperations and research platforms exist already today but could and should be expanded. In Sweden there are both a national cooperation and a research platform as well as cooperations with individual manufacturers. In 2008, Volvo Cars and the Swedish Traffic Administration signed an agreement of cooperation. The aim was to get an overall view on the relationship between motor vehicles and the infrastructure and how this relationship could be improved and augmented. More information on this cooperation and outcomes will be discussed in a later chapter.

In 2019, Volvo Cars launched an initiative to share traffic safety research results with the traffic safety community. The initiative is called Equal Vehicle safety for All (EVA). The purpose of this initiative is to make Volvo Cars’ collection of more than 100 research reports available and accessible to researchers, governments, and other vehicle manufacturers and suppliers. This is the collected research creating the foundation for a whole selection of Volvo’s safety technology innovations.

In the case of modern vehicles, there is a high level of penetration of connectivity. This means that communication between vehicles or between vehicles and the infrastructure, either through cellular cloud connectivity or direct Wi-Fi connectivity (direct short-range communication, DSRC), will be useful for sharing data between vehicles.

Among the possibilities for sharing real-time data between vehicles are data on slippery road ways. The electronic stability systems, standard in most vehicles today, have the capacity to identify and measure icy patches on the road. This information can then be sent to central alarm centers that in turn can share this information with other connected vehicles. In parallel, information can be sent to the road maintenance units that can be dispatched to distribute sand or salt on these patches. This is a very efficient and accurate way of quickly acting against a road threat in a very precise manner. This type of arrangement is now already in operation in some places pioneering this type of data sharing, and there are also manufacturers who are ready for taking part in this type of cooperation.

Volvo Cars introduced the possibility for this type of data sharing with the car models produced in the mid-2010s and today covers all car models in production.

Having a large number of data probes out in traffic, there is also a large potential also in sharing other types of data, e.g., bad air quality, congestions, issues on the road, etc.

In summary, according to the view of Volvo Cars, the recommendations for motor vehicle manufacturers’ responsibilities may be defined as:

• Making safe and reliable products that offer the highest level of safety regardless of age, gender, or size and both for people inside the vehicles and unprotected road users outside of the vehicles

• In line with the manufacturers’ social responsibility, aim towards having all activities related to manufacturing, transportation of goods, service purchasing, and employee road travels on official business made with a level of safety that is in line with the targets of eliminating road casualties

• Sharing knowledge on research and data gathering from incidents and crashes that may be an asset for further research and product development

• Sharing real-time data gathered by modern connected vehicles to other cars, to road authorities, and to other important stakeholders

• Cooperating with governments, authorities, infrastructure owners, academia, and the motor vehicle industry in finding the most optimal way in creating a safe and efficient road traffic system

• Distributing the knowledge and advancements of modern motor vehicles globally by offering the same level of safety to all markets regardless of the existence of government standards

Volvo Cars Safety Vision

The Volvo Cars Safety Vision states that no one should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car. This vision was adopted in 2007 and was a result of the very encouraging safety work done for decades and the projections of what was feasible and achievable linked to the future technical potential developments. This is also in line with Volvo Cars’ heritage. Already at the start of the company, Volvo decided to focus on safety as one of the core values of the company.

The Volvo Safety Centre is continuously monitoring the outcome of crashed vehicles by collecting data and by cooperating with a number of stakeholders, e.g., the authorities in a number of countries in order to gather data on Volvo cars involved in crashes and the outcomes of the occupants.

Structured Safety Design of Vehicles

Real-Life Safety: The Foundation for the Safety Design

The development of occupant safety must be based on the improved protection in real life. Having a structured way of learning how vehicles perform in real crashes and the relationship and behavior of occupants and other road users to the technologies, such as restraint systems, are key to this knowledge. In learning about the traditional occupant protection systems perform, Volvo is using an approach named “Circle of Life.” Crash and incident data, gathered since the early 1970s, are forming the base for setting the requirements for the performance of all safety systems, on complete vehicle level, as well as on system and component levels for the vehicles that are to be developed. Once the next generation of vehicles has been exposed to the real-life environment and exposed to crashes and incidents, new data is gathered which in turn will form the basis for the updated requirements which will form the foundation for the new vehicle development.

This way of using real-life data, naturally, needs a structured way of gathering data or having access to this data. For Volvo Cars, gathering crash and incident data was part of the company’s approach to vehicle design starting in the early 1970s. At this time, the company has, in its corporate accident data base, gathered data from more than 40,000 crashes involving 70,000 occupants. However, given a more cross-functional and more open relationship between manufacturers towards sharing vehicle crash data, and the availability for accessing other sources of data, all manufacturers now would be able to approach improved vehicle safety using the real-life safety approach.

Assessing the benefits of new technologies and innovations may, however, pose some challenges. In particular, to a large degree, this is the case for advanced avoidance and support technologies. Here, assessments and projections of technology effectiveness will be essential before the proper data is gathered. Using available research data and data from behavioral studies will indicate, without giving the precise level of effectiveness, that the introduction of a new vehicle technology will help to enhance safety and therefore has a value for being added to the vehicle’s overall occupant protection system.

Overall Safety Strategy

Traditionally crash safety has been the focus for improved safety performance of vehicles for many decades. Although many systems for avoiding crashes existed, these systems primarily were based on basic technologies with none or limited use of advanced electronic components and intelligence.

From the advent of the new millennium, new advanced safety systems started to be engineered and introduced into the vehicle fleet. The first system to be introduced was ABS (anti-locking braking system) which was then followed by ESC (electronic stability control system ). In particular ESC has proven to be a valuable contributor to increased vehicle safety by stabilizing the vehicles in a number of instability situations and helping to avoid conflicts and crashes.

The development of these systems was the starting point for a whole set of systems helping to avoid or mitigate crashes. At the same time, the crashworthiness systems continued to be developed, and also new post-crash systems, such as on call systems, started to be developed and introduced on the markets.

All these developments paved the way for a new playing field where manufacturers’ safety strategies turned into viewing the overall picture instead of each safety mode separately. The target when using a more holistic view on the safety strategy is primarily to cut the chain of events leading to a crash as early as possible and to, hopefully, totally avoid a serious situation and the crash. As an example of this, see picture of Volvo’s Safety Strategy below.

Even if the chain is not completely cut, the interaction of the avoidance or mitigation systems and the crash protection systems may significantly improve the chances of survival even if the end result is a crash. The action of the preventative systems may reduce the impact energy so that the vehicle’s protection systems can handle the remaining energy. To exemplify this, e.g., a pedestrian detection and braking system may reduce the impact energy sufficiently in order to move the injury risk level significantly from a non-survival level into a level for only minor or intermediate injuries.

The different stages of the chain of events leading to a crash and the events after a crash can be divided into the following stages: risk management or normal driving phase, threat management or conflicts and near-crash phase, injury management or crash phase, and post-crash phase.

During the risk management or normal phase, many preventative actions could be taken, actions that would assist in ruling out any further negative development. Examples of those actions are improved comfort in the passenger compartment; improved ergonomics and HMIs (human machine interface); systems encouraging improved driver attention and reducing the risk of distracted drivers, e.g., the risk of driver’s eyes not focusing on the road; alcohol interlocks and sobriety checks for reducing the risk of driving while intoxicated; and improved navigation systems helping to reduce the risk of stressed drivers. In additions to this, the systems for assessing the drivers’ drowsiness levels and for helping drivers to steer back on the road when not paying attention also have the potential of cutting the chain of events leading to a crash.

For the conflict part or the threat management phase, the focus is to assist the driver in avoiding a collision and taking the situation back into the normal phase. Typical systems acting during the conflict phase are ESC (electronic stability control systems), BAS (brake assist systems), and FCWs (forward collision warning). All these systems interact with the drivers and are activated when the in-vehicle sensors are detecting a development moving away from the normal phase.

The near-crash or avoidance and mitigation phases occur during the time span starting 2–3 s before a crash (two to three TTC – time to crash) and until the crash occurs. This is the time span when it is too late for the drivers to act but still time for the systems to react and try to prevent or reduce the consequences of a crash.

If the chain of events is not cut, the vehicle will enter the crash phase. If the preventative systems have been active in reducing the level of impact, the restraint systems together with the occupant protection systems will be in a better position to reduce the risk of injuries to the occupants. Regardless of the impact reducing potential of the preventative systems, the potential of protecting the occupants in a modern motor vehicle with the most advanced crashworthiness system is undoubtedly high. Modern vehicles have a whole set of combinations of efficient crashworthiness protection systems that have proven to be giving elevated levels of occupant safety. Among other things, car manufacturers have spent extensive resources in adapting the body structure for an optimized level of energy absorption by using various steel qualities, among those a high level of ultrahigh strength steels. Also, the restraint systems, e.g., inflatable restraints, belts with load limiters and pre-tensioners, child seat restraints, and interior systems absorbing energy during impacts, all are part of the occupant protection while in a crash.

Numerous systems active during this time span have been developed, and more are in the pipe line to be developed or launched. Systems such as automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems, lane departure warning and lane keeping aid systems (LDW, LKA), and pre-crash belt tensioners and seat adjustment systems have all been introduced and have proven to be effective in reducing injuries and fatalities. As an example the effectiveness of low-speed autonomous emergency braking of these systems leads to a reduction of 38% of real-world rear-end crashes (Fildes et al. (2015)).

Fig. 5

Examples of active safety support systems available on the market

The last stage in the crash sequence is the post-crash phase. During this phase actions can be taken to, e.g., brake the vehicle in order not to create multiple crashes and reduce the risk of fires by minimizing the fuel leakage and automatically calling for assistance from rescue personnel by sending messages of locations and crash severity via so-called e-call systems.

Included in the overall strategy is also the need to protect vulnerable road users. This includes both minimizing the risk of crashing with a VRU and minimizing the outcome. Manufacturers have spent extensive resources on making the front part of the vehicles benign and also to develop systems for detecting and braking for pedestrians and bicyclists, preferably avoiding a crash; but in the case that it cannot be avoided, minimize the impact. Volvo Cars was the first manufacturer to introduce this type of technology in 2010, and since then the technology has cascaded into all segments of passenger vehicles. However, the heavy truck industry has been slow to react, and as of yet (2020), the technology is not available in this motor vehicle segment.

With further preventative technology advancements, this safety strategy will be even more dominant in the future. For this reason, it is important that the advancements are shared among all road users on all continents. Cascading strategies from the premium segment of vehicles to the large-volume production of vehicles are already occurring and will be more rapid with lower unit prices and more adaptions into newer vehicle platforms. Even though there is a significant time lag, the technologies are starting to penetrate both into the middle- or low-income markets and into the used car fleet, the reason why there should be hope for experiencing significant reductions in casualties rather close in time.

The development of self-driving or autonomous vehicles also has a potential of reducing the number of serious injuries and fatalities in the road transportation system. It is estimated that around 90–94% of all crashes have a human error as part of the causation. Since the human error part is estimated to be almost nullified when applying autonomous technology, it is estimated that 90–95% of the crashes occurring in today’s traffic may be eliminated. Even before the AD technology has fully penetrated the vehicle fleet, the cautious behavior of the self-driving cars will have a soothing effect on the overall traffic management and vehicle speed.

Also, the advanced technologies developed for letting cars be self-driving, such as sensors, detection algorithms, and duplicate reliable data processors, may be active also when the cars are not in autonomous mode and will potentially help to significantly raise the level of awareness for the drivers, and the support systems may be even more efficient in assisting drivers and for acting when drivers are no longer able to be part in avoiding or mitigating the crashes.

In summary, a holistic safety strategy looking at all modes of driving and crash causations will be paramount in taking vehicle safety towards zero fatalities and serious injuries. Most of this development is driven by the market forces without government standards pushing manufacturers. In the past, government standards were the driving force for improving vehicle safety. Today, most of the new advanced technologies are not regulated but have been introduced on the market following high levels of customer demand due to the existing clear and comprehensive customer information, primarily through different vehicle rating programs, so-called New Car Assessment Program (NCAP). With more data sharing and more focus on the whole chain of events leading to a crash and by using this in the priorities of development of new advanced technologies, significant steps towards zero are expected by the efforts of vehicle manufacturers.

Fig. 6

Volvo safety strategy

Focus on Designing Around People

“Cars are driven by people, the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo therefore is, and must remain, safety.” This statement was made early in the history of Volvo, at the time when a human-based focus was not the norm and common practice adopted by all other manufacturers.

By using this principle of designing around the humans, this emphasizes the focus on creating an environment in the vehicle around all occupants that enables, besides comfort and convenience, the car to support a safe and pleasurable ride which enhances the trust of the occupants and a comfortable ride.

For many years, this was primarily done by making a very reliable and trustworthy design of the vehicles in addition to adding features that improved safety and gradually improving the ergonomic driving environment. Many of the early technical innovations for safety, such as the three-point seat belt, very clear in its message of safety and creating a feeling of making a difference when used, have been important in this strategy.

During the last decades, many technical advancements have been made in improving and adapting the ergonomic features within the passenger compartments, all helping to create a comfortable environment reducing the fatigue of both drivers and other occupants. For drivers, extensive research has been performed in order to reduce the risk of both distraction and avoidable driver mistakes due to inappropriate vehicle-to-driver communication. Among those features are, for drivers, assistance systems that both communicate all important information in a clear, comprehensive, and undistracted format that avoids both misunderstandings and unnecessarily increasing the drivers’ anxiety and stress levels as well as improving the trust and level of assurance of the vehicle’s safety systems and thus improving comfort and well-being.

Other systems could also act as safety features. For example, infotainment systems and navigation systems have a potential of assisting drivers, thus relieving tension and reducing stress and in this way giving the driver a better position in carrying out the driving task.

Driver Distraction and Attention Selection

While cars are still driven by and in control by humans, safety is highly dependent on the driver being alert and focused on the driving. Drivers being distracted for various reasons such as carrying out secondary tasks in addition to driving, being exposed to high workloads, different distracting scenarios occurring outside of and around the vehicle, interaction with other occupants in the car, etc. may fail to be fully capable for a short or longer time to safely carry out the driving task. Examples of secondary tasks are dialling and texting using cell phones, web browsing, watching movies or television, selecting music on playlists, and inputting address on electronic displays, i.e., tasks that require the drivers to take their eyes off the road for a short or longer time. This kind of distraction may also be created by complicated vehicle controls requiring the drivers to move both the attention and eye view away from the road and the driving.

Accident statistics show that distraction is a major contribution or a part of the causation of a high number of fatalities in many countries. Only in the USA this number is estimated to be around 3500 per year. Distraction is also reported to be a factor in around 8.5% of all crashes involving fatalities.

Too low workloads may also be unsafe by creating a low attention level that in turn requires a longer time for drivers to act in case of the need of a critical action.

Legal restrictions have been imposed on what kind of secondary tasks and what driver activities are to be allowed while being behind the wheel. Those restrictions include banning the use of handheld cell phones, texting, watching movies or television, and performing secondary tasks in general while driving.

Most countries in both the Eastern and Western world, including local provinces and states, have these legal restrictions in place. Some jurisdictions are also actively enforcing these by actively monitoring and fining drivers found to be violating them.

In addition to formal legal restrictions, there are also guidelines being created in trying to guide manufacturers on the best standards for designing the vehicle’s controls, displays, and electronic interfaces with the drivers. For example, the US federal agency National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2013 published (Phase 1) guidelines for in-vehicle electronic devices. These were created as an effort to discourage manufacturers in introducing distracting devices in their vehicles. In 2016 NHTSA published Phase 2 of the guidelines covering distraction caused by devices brought into the vehicles such as cell phones and other electronic devices not part of the vehicles’ original equipment.

Some trade organizations such as manufacturer trade organizations and consumer organizations have also created recommendations and guidelines for reducing the risk of distraction linked to vehicles’ electronic devices.

With the development of new and advanced driver assistance technologies, driver monitoring is becoming a key for assessing the driver’s attention to his/her driving task. With this technology it is possible to adapt a whole set of support systems and also assess if to lower the availability of the number of vehicle features that could possibly be distracting for drivers in a low-attention mode.

A number of other ways of reducing the workload for drivers and minimizing the risk for distraction will be offered, among those speech and gesture guidance.

Driver monitoring may also be linked to other useful support systems, such as drowsiness systems and systems for minimizing the risk for drivers being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Driver assessments of drowsiness or distraction may also be combined with other detection systems such as analyzing steering wheel movements. By combining various assessments of drivers’ attentiveness and readiness to perform their driver duties in a safe way, decisions may be made also whether to increase the settings of warning and automatically activate systems to compensate for a lower driver performance.

Potentially, with more mature driver assessment system, this kind of support systems could also be extended for other ways of making the continuous ride safe, such as so-called limp-home modes, where the vehicle could be still driven and moving forward but only with reduced speed and raised vigilance levels of the support systems.

Fig. 7

Driver monitoring camera

Improved Protection for All Occupants, Independent of Age, Gender, or Size

One of the most important requirements in the principle “design around you” is that all occupants need to be given the same level of occupant protection regardless of gender, size, and age.

This implies that the restraint systems need to be adapted to the specific needs, geometric sizes, and tolerance levels of the full range of occupants likely to use the different seating positions in the vehicle. Many technical innovations have been developed and implemented for these adaptions, such as belt load limiters and adjustable seat belt anchorages as well as occupant sensing systems used for decision-making in deploying or not deploying the inflatable restraint systems.

Many of the protection systems implemented have a wide coverage in the efficiency of protecting the occupants without special adaptions. For example, whiplash protection systems have proven to give a good improvement in protecting the occupants even though generic testing tools and in-vehicle protection systems are used. However, further advancement can potentially be made by adapting the tools and criteria to both genders, sizes, and age differences. Actions have been taken to create a whiplash dummy more adapted to the typical female sizes and applying female tolerance levels. By using different dummy sizes in the testing and applying the tolerance levels for more fragile body constitutions, this would cover not only the gender aspect but also the age and fragility aspect.

Similar actions should be taken when it comes to other testing tools such as frontal and side anthropomorphic test dummies, new injury criteria, and updated, more stringent tolerance levels.

In 2019, Volvo Cars created an initiative named EVA (Equal Vehicle safety for All). Through this initiative, Volvo Cars is making a number of research reports public and is keeping a library open for other researchers and manufacturers. The reports cover findings from both testing and investigations of real-life accidents.

These reports basically make a number of data points available that may be puzzled together to be used for making significant advancements in knowledge that may be used both for safety design improvements and further development of test tools and test methods and setting injury criteria.

With further advancements of the technologies, in particular driver assistance systems, more possibilities and potentials for individual adaptions will be available. Already today, systems exist for measuring driver alertness and distraction levels and systems that can be set in advance. Among those are forward collision warning (FCW) systems and automatic emergency braking systems (AEBS) that offer different settings depending on the individual capabilities. Those settings do, however, basically require drivers to do this manually in advance, using their own view of their own capacity and capabilities.

The next step after this would possibly also include health assessments and alerts to the drivers given their health status. It is, however, very important always to use this with the full support of the driver and not to infringe on the drivers’ integrity. If supported and appreciated by drivers, such adaptions would be seamless and dormant until needed and should preferably not to be used as a correction of the drivers’ behavior but instead be considered as your invisible friend who is there to help you when needed.

For customers who want feedback on the driving performance and suggested improvements, such information could possibly be embedded in the vehicles’ data recorder and provided upon request.

Already today, schemes exist for rewarding drivers who are following basic rules of safe driving performance, e.g., insurance company pay-as-you drive programs where car owners can get insurance premium discounts. This kind of incentive would have an even larger potential of being beneficial by giving continuous driving performance feedback by the systems developed as part of the designed-around-you principle.

Child Restraints and Child Safety

As stated in the previous chapter, it is of paramount importance, and it is the responsibility of all car manufacturers to offer the same level of occupant protection for occupants in the vehicle regardless of occupant sizes, ages, and genders.

This creates a special focus on protection of children given their unique biomechanical characteristics with different body and mass proportions and different sustainability and resilience characteristics than adults and other more mature occupants.

This becomes very obvious from looking at the body proportions of children at different ages when comparing this with adults.

Fig. 8

Body proportions. Children vs adults

With this background, offering lower and insufficient protection for the most vulnerable category of occupants in a vehicle is simply not acceptable. Child restraints offering protection for all sizes of children is a prerequisite and necessity in order to reach a high level of protection for child occupants.

The first versions of child restraints giving an efficient protection for infants and toddlers started to appear in the mid-1960s.

Fig. 9

Early rearward-facing child restraint prototype

Since the first prototypes in the 1960s, the design and development of efficient child restraints have resulted in enormous improvements in the knowledge on how to best protect infants and toddlers and how to best seat them in the vehicles and have also led to an array of available restraints in many countries.

In Sweden, by the late 2010s, the number of children dying in traffic when restrained in a child restraint annually is extremely low. In most cases there is some kind of misuse involved, and this normally is part in causing this tragic outcome.

There are many actions taken in order to reach this respectable record. One reason is that all major stakeholders in Sweden, i.e., authorities, safety advocates, road safety interest organizations, suppliers, vehicle manufacturers, and vehicle importers, share a common view on how to approach all aspects of protecting children in cars. Among those are the principles of how to position children in the vehicles at different ages and what kinds of child restraints are suitable at different sizes and ages of children. This in turn is used by the responsible institutions for direct communication with parents or parents to be, in preparation for how to best protect the children at different stages of development. One of the basic principles used in this communication is that children should be rearward facing as long as this is practicable and possible. A rearward-facing restraint offers support for the head and the back of an infant in the case of a frontal crash. By giving this support, the risk of neck injuries, one of the most dominant injuries to small children, is substantially reduced.

Consequently, the recommendation for all parents and caretakers is to have all children, up to at least the age of 4 years or as long as practicable, positioned in rearward-facing child restraints.

Once the children are too large in size to be fitted in rearward-facing child restraints, appropriate forward-facing toddler seats, giving protection in all types of crashes, should be used.

In 2016, Volvo introduced a new generation of rearward-facing toddler seats. For these restraints the recommended ages are 9 months to 6 years and between 9 and 25 kg in weight.

Fig. 10

Volvo rearward-facing infant and toddler seats

Fig. 11

Built-in booster cushion

Although the child has outgrown the toddler seat, it is still not readily prepared for using the adult seat belts without adaptions. The geometries of the belt anchorages are normally positioned in a way to offer good protection for adults. Children at the ages between 3 and 10 years do have characteristics which are not completely compatible with adult seat belts. Children at these ages do not have some skeleton features such as pelvic bones developed. The pelvic bones are used for transferring the forces from the lap belt portion of the three-point belts to the body skeleton for an adult occupant. In the case of a child, the hip should be raised in order to transfer the load into the thighs and the lower part of the skeleton.

All of this leads to the use of a platform for raising the children in order to better adapt the belt geometry of the seat belts and to give the children better protection, so-called booster seats. Those booster seats may have only a belt-positioning platform to position the lap belt or both a platform and a back that positions both the lap and shoulder belt parts of the three-point seat belts. The recommendation is that booster seats should be used up to the age of 10 years.

In order to have this type of restraint readily available, some manufacturers, among those Volvo, offer built-in child restraints, restraints that are incorporated in the car seats and that can be easily activated and placed in position for seating a child. These may be offered in one or more positions. Multi-stage booster seats have the potential of a better adaption to the size of a child.

Built-in booster seats are highly recommended restraints that should be adopted by all manufacturers in order to have an easy access to the best possible child protection.

One of the restraining forces for offering the best possible child protection is what is legally possible when it comes to certifying those restraints. Within the present legal framework, there are legal requirements that do not open up for the most efficient restraints offering the best protection for the children. There are a number of reasons for this, however not acceptable. Among those are that customers are not ready and capable of installing the more advanced in a way that is required in order to offer this protection and not being misused. The knowledge on how to best protect children in vehicles have come far since Volvo offered the first design of a child seat early in the 1970s. It is time to allow for more flexibility within the legal framework allowing for more advanced child restraints in the future.

Adaptions for Occupants with Special Needs

The principles of a transportation system open for all and equal protection for all imply that vehicle manufacturers should make adaptions for occupants of different sizes and varied needs as far as this is practicably possible. These adaptions could be offered as optional equipment or part of the vehicle’s built-in features. At Volvo, there is a special section of the company named Volvo Special Vehicles whose assignment is to redesign the production vehicles so as to be better adapted to individuals with special needs and other challenges.

These adaptions include special swerving seats for easier access for a person in a wheelchair and special arrangements of the seats and controls for addressing other physical challenges.

Other car companies also offer these kinds of modifications to their vehicles, either through factory-installed equipment or through aftermarket modifications using original accessories .

Preventing Serious Violations

Preventing Driving While Under Influence (DWI)

The three most common causes for traffic fatalities due to motor vehicle crashes are still failure to use the seat belts, speeding, and driving while under influence of alcohol or drugs.

Most countries in the developed world have laws for maximum blood alcohol content (BAC) while driving. The allowed levels vary significantly between different countries and different parts of the world.

Three different levels of allowed BAC can be identified: 0.02%, 0.05%, and 0.08%. There are also countries that have a limit of 0% but with low levels of enforcement.

Sweden is applying the 0.02% limit. This is a statement from the authorities that drinking and driving cannot be tolerated. This is also highly enforced by the police.

Many European countries apply 0.05%. The only major exception from this is Great Britain who applies 0.08%.

In the USA, most states also apply 0.08%. This level of allowed BAC is generally considered to be too high in relation to what are the acceptable levels found in human behavior and traffic safety research.

In the early 2000s, Volvo decided to develop and offer an alcohol interlock as an optional equipment for all new vehicles. This device, called Alcoguard, was launched to customers in 2008.

It consists of a wireless handheld device that is connected to the vehicle’s ignition system. The device has a mouthpiece that the driver must blow into before the engine may be started.

Volvo is so far the only manufacturer that offers an alcohol interlock of its own design as optional equipment, but many car manufacturers do, however, offer the cabling necessary for installing an interlock in the vehicle design.

Fig. 12

Volvo Cars Alcoguard system

The interlock devices presently offered within the automotive sector as an optional equipment all suffer from having a set of major issues making the device undesired by customers and drivers. Among those issues are high costs, low level of reliability, and the need for frequent calibrations. A design using a mouthpiece also suffers from the opportunity of an intoxicated driver to hand over the mouthpiece to another occupant, most likely to the occupant in the front passenger seat.

Significant research and product development efforts have been made focusing on less intrusive, more reliable, and less costly solutions than blowing into a mouthpiece.

Among those are designs for blowing into a faucet located in the center hub of the steering wheel, skin detection systems to be located on the steering wheel, and infrared beams placed in front of the driver’s face.

Many of those solutions are still in the development stage and are not yet ready for commercial introduction. Some of them, however, look promising and may meet the requirements to be accepted by customers and drivers.

The US Federal Government in the form of Department of Transportation is looking at continuing its drunk-driving prevention project DADSS (Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety) that they have been working on for more than a decade. The technology is still not ready for production, but is now sufficiently developed for pilot testing in fleets.

The device for detecting too high BACs also suffers from the fact that it only covers one of the factors for driver intoxication and lower driver performance. A number of other causes exist for drivers being under influence that would affect the driving capability. Misuse of different drugs is one of the primary causes of driver intoxication and lower driving capability. Although, in many cases, the persons misusing drugs are also likely to misuse alcohol, this still does not always go hand in hand.

A completely different way of approaching the ways for reducing the consequences of drunk-driving and all other types of drug misuse and intoxication in the traffic system would be to measure the drivers’ driving capability in real time. This would focus on the main issue, the risk for creating incidents and crashes instead of measuring something leading to a risk of creating this. By doing this, other factors creating risks would be covered, not just intoxication but also, e.g., distraction and drowsiness.

As discussed in the section linked to distraction and drowsiness , driver monitoring is becoming key for assessing the driver’s attention and capability to carry out the driving task.

Volvo Cars believes that the issues of driver intoxication and distraction should be addressed by installing in-car cameras and other sensors that monitor the driver and allow the car to intervene if a clearly intoxicated or distracted driver does not respond to warning signals and is risking an accident involving serious injury or death.

The intervention could involve limiting the car’s speed, alerting an e-call assistance service, and, as a final course of action, actively slowing down and safely parking the car.

With this technology it is also possible to adapt a whole set of support systems and also assessing if to lower the availability of the number of vehicle features that could possibly be distracting for drivers in a low attention mode.

Fig. 13

Graph showing the risk linked to intoxication and the possible measures. (Volvo Cars)

A number of other ways of reducing the workload for drivers and minimizing the risk for distraction will be offered, among those speech and gesture guidance.

Since a decade back, systems exist that have the potential to detect distracted or drowsy drivers. In 2007 Volvo Cars launched a system named Driver Alert. This system measures the way the driver is handling the steering in relation to the lane markings on the road. The basic theory is that fully alert drivers are making micro corrections using the steering wheel, while more drowsy or distracted drivers are making more jerky movements. This theory has proven to be valid, both in field operational tests (FOT) and in order research.

The potentials for these systems are considerable and obvious. Car manufacturers are therefore strongly encouraged to continue these efforts into balancing driver capabilities with the vehicle’s driving features and the possibilities in order to reach a safe state of driving when looking at all conditions.

Speeding

The issue of allowing the possibility of speeding on public roads instead of restricting the top speed of the vehicles close to the speed limits is something widely debated between policymakers and manufacturers. Systems, called speed limiters, are developed and available for assisting and encouraging drivers in selecting a speed corresponding to the actual speed limit of the stretch of road in question. Many manufacturers are offering these devices either as optional equipment or as a standard factory-installed device. The present highlighted discussion between governments and manufacturers is whether to require speed limiters that prevent a higher speed than the speed limit plus a margin regardless if the driver’s wish is to drive faster. The argument is that there are no circumstances where speeding has any additional benefits for society or adding to traffic safety but instead leads to serious consequences for both the society and the individuals, and therefore speeding should be no option for drivers.

Even though the basic arguments for forcing a non-speeding road transportation environment are sound and wise, this should only be instituted when both the technology and the road infrastructure have matured sufficiently to offer a high level of reliability for applying an accurate speed for all situations, all road types, and all road sections. Forcing out new innovative systems that are not fully developed and sufficiently tested, and at the same time as the interface with the infrastructure is not fully reliable and quality assured, faces the risk of drivers and cars ending up in awkward situations with unintended speeds not matching the speed limits which in turn could lead to creating driver and customer opposition and distrust that might be long lasting and will be difficult to repair. An example of this occurring was with the seat belt interlock mandate for all new vehicles in the USA manufactured in the period 1972–1973. These mandated devices prevented the engine to start unless the driver was buckled up. Unfortunately, the reliability of the devices installed by the manufacturers was poor, and many cars refused to start even if the drivers were buckled up. The uproar and the customers’ dissatisfaction resulted in a buying resistance and consequently to a revoked requirement for installment of these devices. It even got as far as ending up with an act in Congress prohibiting setting a new mandate for forcing the fitment of similar devices in the future. It also caused a delay in adopting mandatory seat belt laws in the states in the USA and a delay in the seat belt usage rate in the USA.

Actions for increasing enforcement of the speed limits are often put forward as an effective means of reducing the levels and the extent of speeding. Enforcement is, indeed, an efficient but expensive means for limiting speeding. Extensive number of traffic police, speed cameras, video recordings, and road appliances for tracking speeding vehicles – all these are costly and cannot cover all road sections. A larger penetration of driver assistance speed-limiting systems and, eventually, when the technology is mature and reliable and the road infrastructure has achieved a quality-assured speed limit posting, mandatory speed-limiting systems would offer a more efficient way of reaching a level of less speeding violations.

Although most countries and territories have adopted speed limits for all roads, there are still a few unique areas and types of roads that offer free speeds without limitations. The best-known type of road with free speeds is the German Autobahn. Discussions have been intense within the European community on the suitability of keeping this unique policy in the heart of the European continent. Still, this is applied, and although congestions reduce the actual speeds, appalling crashes occur, and the arguments of the possibility to drive fast legally prevents and deters many manufacturers in applying reasonable top speeds for their cars and to actively support mandatory speed-limiting devices.

Some manufacturers, including Volvo, have launched concepts where the vehicle’s key could be programmed for adapting certain features such as the car’s maximum speed. This kind of device allows the owners to set limitations on the car’s top speed before lending their car to other family members or to younger and inexperienced drivers such as teenagers that only just received their drivers’ licenses.

In 2019, Volvo Cars stated that it had made the decision to restrict the maximum speed for all its new cars and models to 180 kmh by 2020. This decision was made after careful considerations and market investigations on the customer preferences and needs. The company has received a lot of support for making this decision within the safety community. This is also a way for the company to assume its corporate social responsibility for protecting both the humans and the environment.

In the context of high speeds and protecting the occupants, belt usage is extremely important. Higher usage rates in many countries in addition to the higher levels of seat belt reminders have assisted this development.

However, in many countries, higher belt usage rates only apply to the front seats. Rear seat usage rates are appallingly low on many markets. Both governments and manufacturers should increase their efforts to inform occupants on the importance of being belted in the rear seat.

As an example, the Swedish National Society for Road Safety (NTF) ran ads in the Swedish media a decade ago called “No elephants in the car please!” These ads clearly showed customers the risk for the front seat occupants of having an occupant unbelted in the rear seat. For example, it informed customers that for a crash at 50 km/h and an occupant whose weight is 75 kg, the corresponding weight considering the g-forces in the crash would be 3000 kg (3 tonnes)! This campaign was considered to be successful and has helped to significantly increase the belt usage rate in the rear seat.

The campaign was considered successful, and surveys afterwards showed a higher consciousness of car occupants to be belted while in the rear seat.

A recent development supporting the actions to prevent speeding is the introduction of the geofencing technology, an innovation forcing different kinds of restrictions to be applied to specific geographical areas. Examples of restrictions are maximum speed and only using electromobility within a city center area. This would be a very efficient means of, e.g., forcing compliance with speed restrictions outside of schools and shared spaces with vulnerable road users. Volvo Cars fully supports the deployment of this type of technology and believes that it will be an important contributor to reducing speeding and traffic casualties in critical city areas.

In conclusion, Volvo Cars believes that cars staying within the speed limit will be necessary in meeting the Vision Zero target, and measures for limiting the top speed and installing speed-limiting devices in motor vehicles will be an essential component in a strategy for preventing speeding violations.

The Responsibilities of Car Manufacturers for Sharing Car Technology Developments Globally

The levels of traffic safety globally vary significantly. This is due to a fragmented picture of many factors, such as infrastructure status, the structure and development level of the transportation sector, how the road system is being used, levels of enforcements and traffic education, incentives and factors for improving safety, societal factors of age, gender distribution, general social status, and rural, urban, and infrastructure planning. An important factor is also the generic level of age and size distribution in the vehicle fleet as well as the technical level of advancements of the fleet.

Governments here have a major responsibility for both encouraging a renewal of the fleet at appropriate intervals as well as incentivizing technology advancements and setting minimum performance requirements for safety. However, there are a number of developing countries who have neither established any encouragements for adopting new technologies nor set any minimum legal safety performance requirements.

For Volvo, the level of safety needs to be the same regardless of any government mandates, third-party testing, or other outside requirements. Humans of all genders, sizes, and ages should be protected on an equal level. So, provided there are no unique circumstances dictating a special variant, no differentiation should be made on equipment and performance levels. Volvo Cars strongly advocates all manufacturers to adopt the same generic policy.

Cooperation Between Different Traffic Stakeholders

Traditionally, the roads for the last 100 years have been designed based on fairly standard principles of offering a space where different road users could apply whatever means of transportation that was available and with rather basic standards for sharing this road space, staying safe, and reaching the goal for the journey.

Although the designs of the modern roads have indeed made significant advancements, the concept has still been to offer an open space for all vehicles, and then the vehicle manufacturers designed the vehicles assuming basic standard requirements for being able to carry the occupants safe and not to harm other road users.

However, with more advanced vehicles, higher speeds, more congestions and competition of the road space, and the need to significantly reduce the road casualties, the need for closer cooperation between vehicle manufacturers and the authorities has become clear during the last two decades.

Also, in order to get closer to the Vision Zero, a holistic view must be applied in order to balance both the vehicles’ occupant protection in relation to the planning and design of the infrastructure. For instance, this is relevant when it comes to applying tougher requirements for road vehicles in different types of collisions. Applying tougher standards in order to meet very small numbers of collisions will automatically lead to less optimized levels of actions to improve all aspects of crash protection, e.g., restraint systems, passive crash protection, and other advanced occupant protection systems which add both costs and potentially weight. The consequences may potentially be new road vehicles being larger in size, being more expensive, and with lower levels of fuel economy, i.e., less attractive to both policymakers and customers, which in turn would reduce the pace towards reaching the desired level of traffic safety.

During the last decades, many efforts have been made in order to review the approaches to cooperations and to set the standards for both the design of roads and vehicles. Many of these cooperations have opened up for reaching clear views on how to most efficiently use the possible means for improving traffic safety and how to find a holistic view of how all stakeholders may be involved in reaching this.

However, in order to be able to efficiently explore the full possibilities of these cooperations, it requires the right mind-set of all stakeholders involved in reaching a Vision Zero target and the organizational and legal means for making real progress and setting standards that enable real progress. The stakeholders must be able to share a view of what would be the most optimized contributions of each one and how this would work together in a holistic and integrated approach.

In September 2007, the Swedish Road Administration and Volvo Car Corporation signed an agreement on cooperation for improving traffic safety in Sweden. This can be seen as extension and link up with both the Vision Zero target that was adopted by the Swedish Parliament in 1997 and Volvo Car’s Safety Vision that was launched in 2007. The Swedish Vision Zero target did state the principles for how to approach the design of the transport system by stating that:

• The transportation system must be adapted to the human tolerances.

• “Normal” human mistakes should not have severe consequences. Instead, the transport system should be forgiving with respect to those mistakes.

The agreement of cooperating as signed by the parties included a number of areas of cooperation, including:

• A division of responsibilities for a whole set of conflict scenarios.

  These scenarios include, among others, frontal crashes, car-to-car side impacts, car-to-car rear impacts, car and VRU conflicts, car and wild animal conflicts, etc. Each scenario defines the speed of which the responsibility changes hands from the vehicle to the infrastructure. For example, for frontal crashes, a speed is defined for when the responsibility of keeping all occupants safe when a frontal crash occurs is transferred from the car and its occupant protection systems to the infrastructure, i.e., adding certain features to the infrastructure in order to avoid this type of scenario. For car-to-VRU conflicts, a maximum speed is defined for when the cars’ active and passive protection systems should be able to jointly avoid serious injuries to the VRU and when instead the infrastructure should instead be designed in a way to avoid car and VRU conflict by separation. Please see attached figure below.

• Definitions of requirements for various interfaces between the advanced safety systems in the vehicles and certain features on the infrastructure.

  A number of advanced driver assistance systems, e.g., lane departure and lane keeping aid systems, need clear lane markings in order to define if the vehicle is rightly positioned and help the driver and the vehicle to correct the position if needed. For the case of the advanced systems enabling autonomous driving, lateral positioning will be guided through the assistance of lane markings.

  Thus, in order to be fully recognized by the detection systems in the vehicle, certain requirements are identified on the lane marking, e.g., size and contrast. The agreement also identified the requirements for the assurance of the existence of lane markings for all applicable roads.

  The agreements also covered other features needed in order to assure the compatibility between the vehicle’s advanced systems and the infrastructure.

• Sharing of traffic and crash analyses in order to enable the best measures in infrastructure and vehicle design and avoiding traffic casualties.

The agreement of cooperation and dividing of responsibilities has become a role model for other similar approaches in sharing the view of how best to apply the capabilities of vehicles and infrastructures.

Cooperation between different stakeholders and sharing of data will be increasingly important when moving forward to improve traffic safety. This will be of even higher importance for the development of self-driving or autonomous vehicles.

The US government has announced the intentions of data sharing similar to what is done within the field of civil aviation. Here all stakeholders sit together and openly share critical data and agree on certain principles and standards. It should, however, be remarked that there are major differences in the foundation and principles of the transportation sector versus the civil aviation sector.

One of those major differences is that the industry is governed by antitrust laws which establish rules for the cooperation between manufacturers and how much of agreements limits the need for constant stretching of the boundaries of technical developments in occupant protection for motor vehicles. Agreeing on standards would limit the individual manufacturers’ need for always looking for going beyond competitors and create a competitive edge. Also, there are many more actors in the road transportation sector that would significantly reduce the possibilities on agreeing on standards. In addition to this, motor vehicles are used in vastly different conditions and by largely different users and in totally different environments. All of these various factors make the opportunities for agreements on standards and principles a huge challenge, both legally and in practice.

Fig. 14

Division of responsibilities between vehicle manufacturers and authorities

Manufacturers Sharing Research Data

In order to make motor vehicles safer, the knowledge gathered from real-world crashes is key and an invaluable asset. Since 1970, the Volvo Accident Research Team has compiled data from crashes involving Volvo vehicles. This data is and has been essential in understanding what happens during a collision.

With the EVA Initiative (Equal Vehicle safety for All), Volvo is sharing the results and knowledge of 50 years of research. By letting all other interesting parties download this, it will help to make cars safer. Volvo Cars is encouraging other OEMs and suppliers to join in on this effort.

EVA is assisting in identifying a number of data points that may be assembled and rejoined in order to get a more complete and comprehensible view of how to analyze the research data and help to use this data for improved and innovative safety systems.

What becomes clear from the research data is that women presently run a higher risk of getting injured in crashes than men. By using the research results available, it is possible to scale the data points in order to adapt them and be able to scale this to be able to accommodate for both the size and tolerance differences between men and women. This is part of a continuous effort in reaching the goal of having equal protection for all occupants, regardless of gender, size, age, and other tolerance level differences.

This strategy for reaching equal protection between the genders should be and must be the target of all OEMs in designing cars for the future.

One result showing the advantage of using this approach is the development of new technologies in the design of the Volvo Whiplash Protection System “WHIPS,” a system that is built into the front seats and is designed to reduce the loading on the neck of the occupants. When looking at the data of occupant injuries after this restraint had been on the market for a number of years, it was clear that there was a significant lower number of whiplash injuries, in particular for women.

Further Improvements of the Infrastructure

As discussed in the earlier chapter, the design and basic structure of the infrastructure in most parts of the world have had the same outlook for the last century. Some parts are clearly not compatible neither with the present status of the modern vehicles nor with the level of intensity of modern traffic. Infrastructure improvements to reduce the risk for simple human mistakes having serious consequences should be the primary focus in making structural changes in combination with eliminating the types of crashes that will create the highest number of human casualties instead of focusing on transportation efficiency.

As examples of improvements with high potentials of reducing the risk of serious crashes are adding a median barrier on multi-lane highways and other roads or reshaping junctions with crossing high speed traffic with roundabouts or multi-layered viaducts.

Head-on collision is, by far, the most critical crash scenario and the most difficult one, when it comes to impact violence and possible measures to protect the occupants. Having median fences on higher-speed roads would efficiently remove this type of scenario from the radar and put other types of scenarios more in focus for further improving occupant protection, scenarios where measures would be more efficient in reducing fatalities and serious injuries.

A new type of median fence was created in the early 2000s, i.e., a wire fence that guides the car that is swerving towards the oncoming lane back into the ego lane. This type of fence has proven to be highly effective in eliminating head-in crashes (Vadeby 2016).

In-plane crossings and junctions, with high speed limits, share the basic flaw of requiring the full attention of the drivers at all times, and a mistake might lead to serious consequences. This flaw is equally valid for crossings with traffic lights. Human mistakes or drivers running a red light makes this type of scenario severely critical.

In line with one of the principles defined by the Swedish Vision Zero strategy, a human mistake should not lead to serious consequences, but the road structure should be forgiving and absorb this mistake without casualties.

By replacing in-plane crossings and junctions with roundabouts or multi-layered viaducts, the risk of driver mistakes leading to serious consequences will have the potential of being significantly reduced.

Roundabouts require the drivers to reduce the speed and look out for other vehicles in the roundabout which in turn increases the attention level. Although the number of low-speed crashes is likely to increase, the number of casualties goes down.

Measures for reducing the risk of cars injuring or killing pedestrian or other vulnerable road users could be separation of cars and VRUs. Another way practiced in many cities in Europe is to create chaos mixing the different types of road users, thus reducing the speed and creating a low-risk environment. The principle practiced for these examples is an allowed speed of approximately 7–10 kmh and that VRUs in these areas always have the right of way.

Most modern vehicles are or have the possibility of being connected. This opens up for introducing the concept of geofencing into the infrastructure. The technology linked to this may, by connecting up vehicles, restrict the usage of vehicles in a number of different ways. Forced reduced speed limits next to schools, hospitals, or residential areas, limiting driving using combustion engines in city centers, or only allowing pedestrian-friendly cars (e.g., equipped with automatic braking systems for pedestrians) are among those opportunities.

Further Vehicle Development/Autonomous Vehicles

In parallel with the developments of motor vehicle safety, improving occupant crash protection, supporting drivers to avoid or mitigate crashes, and also activating autonomous systems, e.g., autonomous braking and steering, the development of autonomously driven vehicles offers a high level of opportunities for improving traffic safety.

In looking at the cause of motor vehicle crashes, it is estimated that around 90–94% of them involve human error. Autonomously driven vehicles, where the control of the driving is completely resting with the cars, have the potential of almost eliminating the risks associated with human error.

At the moment, there is an intense activity among the manufacturers to develop and test highly autonomous vehicles. The majority of these activities concern passenger cars or smaller vehicles, such as pod cars or smaller buses, but the heavy vehicle industry is also getting more into this important development.

Most national governments, states, or provinces worldwide have adopted rules for testing. Many vehicle manufacturers also have received permits to test self-driving vehicles on public roads.

An autonomous vehicle will have extensive capabilities both to drive safely and by being well prepared for any risks that may be encountered on the operational design domain (ODD) that it is operating on. By having very highly defined maps and extensive sensor and dual redundant computer capabilities, it will be able to deal with all the risks that can be somewhat likely on this ODD. The driving strategy that is pre-programmed into the vehicle and the downloaded map means that it will drive in a way that is exceedingly safe and it will make tactical and strategical decisions based on this.

A whole catalogue of risk situations will be pre-programmed into the vehicle’s central computer. The basis for this is the data of crashes and incidents that have been collected for many years, both by the company through its accident investigation team and by governments and academia, and that forms a basis for covering both the most common incidents and crashes as well as rarer or edge cases. The basis for the AD vehicle design is that vehicles should be prepared for any crashes or risks that are somewhat likely to occur on the whole fleet, consisting of hundreds of thousands of vehicles during decades of driving and on similar ODDs globally.

This knowledge of what kinds of crashes or incidents cannot be gathered by purely road testing but needs to be based primarily on previous knowledge plus what can be added from purely AD-related causes (Lindman 2017).

RAND cooperation has estimated in its report (RAND Corporation 2016) that it would be necessary, by applying only public road testing, to drive hundreds of millions or billions of miles to verify the safety. Even with aggressive and ambitious testing programs, it would take tens or even hundreds of years to reach the levels of miles required. So, test driving alone cannot be used to demonstrate the safety level.

Therefore, the data bases with crashes and incidents are used to provide the knowledge needed. This data is used to simulate the situations that the vehicle’s sensors need to register, and the vehicle’s central computers then have to analyze and decide on the most appropriate actions. Any knowledge gathered from the road testing will, of course, also be added.

So, basically, the autonomous vehicles need to apply road driving strategies and tactics, preparing them for any reasonably scenarios that may occur on the ODDs. Primarily, this means that the vehicles should be able to handle situations without any drama and risk. If something unanticipated occurs, there should always be an exit strategy to handle the situation.

Within the public domain, both in media and within the academia, so-called ethical dilemmas are widely discussed. An ethical dilemma suggests that autonomous vehicles may end up in situations where they have to decide between undesirably scenarios. This is not recognized as a reality among vehicle manufacturers. With the principles for designing the safe handling of the driving, the autonomous vehicles will have a way of dealing with this safely by avoiding being faced with this kind of dilemma.

The technology is yet, however, only at the first initial stages of development, and it will take decades before it can make a serious impact on the number of traffic casualties. Normal cars of different ages and safety levels will also remain on the roads for still a long time in the future.

However, autonomous vehicles have the potential of making an impact by influencing the traffic flows and being a balance to the traffic. Autonomous car will have the built-in capabilities of planning the driving in a tactical and optimized way so that all aspects of comfort, safety, and fuel economy are balanced. The cars will, of course, also stay within the speed limits.

Volvo Cars believes that governments, authorities, manufacturers, suppliers, and other stakeholders should join forces in encouraging this promising development. In particular, the legal requirements’ framework should be adapted to embrace and encourage this evolution.

New Ways of Using Transportation

The transportation sector in the modern society faces many challenges, including congestion, health issues due to air pollutions from vehicle emissions and stressful lifestyles due to long commutes, valuable space lost in cities due to parking and spacious infrastructure, and unacceptable traffic casualties.

All of these point at an unavoidable transformation for how people will be mobile in the future. Individual mobility needs to be gradually expanded into different ways of using shared mobility. Different ways of being mobile are expected to be developed in the next decade, such as mobility as a service, peer-to-peer sharing, vehicle fleets and carpooling, etc.

This in turn is aimed to lead to a reduction in the density of vehicles and less risks of individual mistakes leading to crashes. The vehicles used for car sharing are also expected to have a higher standard of vehicle technology including the latest level of safety technology.

This shift in transportation is consequently offering a potential in reducing the number of traffic casualties at the same time delivering many other benefits.

For many cities in the world, among the challenges linked to modern transportation are living quality, the well-being, and the safety of the inhabitants. The mix of different road users of city streets, with vast differences in sizes and tolerances, from large trucks and buses to unprotected humans and speeds not compatible with the tolerances of the vulnerable road users, is causing huge numbers of killed and seriously injured humans on city streets globally.

With the shift in mobility, smaller units the size of passenger cars or vans, optimized to the size of the need of shared mobility for every journey and route, may replace larger outsized buses and other large-size vehicles occupying the major parts of streets and creating challenges for pedestrians, bicyclists, and smaller motorcycles to navigate safely. Thus, smaller units for shared mobility replacing the outsized public buses in many crowded urban areas may offer a benefit not just for occupying less city space but also for reducing the number of traffic casualties further assisting the efforts towards Vision Zero.

In line with the future focus on shared mobility, Volvo Cars has founded a whole new company, M, whose mission is to offer smart car sharing. This supports the shift from ownership to access to vehicles. Other manufacturers, such as BMW, Audi, and Mercedes, also have successfully formed and ran similar shared mobility companies.

With seamlessness and accessibility to mobility, this role model of car sharing offers the potential of reshaping and reclaiming cities that will offer people more space, more comfort, and improved habitat and living conditions.

Cars are parked more than 95% of their lifespan. With the trend of shifting from ownership to sharing, valuable space, now used for parking, and access to parking may be reclaimed and used as part of making moving around in cities safer. In particular, this also will offer a potential for improved safety for pedestrians by remodelling the vehicle and pedestrian interaction.

Discussion

At the same time as the global situation with constantly increasing numbers of traffic casualties is deeply concerning, the success stories coming from systematic and structured systems safety design are remarkable and indeed promising. By combining the potential of modifying the infrastructure, prioritizing the reduction of human injuries instead of the number of accidents, with the technical developments of improved occupant protection and protection of other road users, the resulting reductions of traffic casualties are striking.

The ingredients in these efforts are proven and all necessary in being successful: firstly, an ambitious government vision broken down into goals and action plans; secondly, a motor vehicle industry with long-term targets of improved occupant safety and also the safety of other road users; thirdly, a cooperation between the governments and manufacturers in order to yield optimized benefits out of all the efforts of improving traffic safety.

The clearest shining success story exemplifying this is the Swedish Vision Zero. Reaching a reduction of traffic fatalities in Sweden from initially 16 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 1970s to 2.7 in 2019 is truly remarkable.

Focusing on minimizing the consequences of simple human mistakes, setting the tolerances in the road transport system at the human tolerance levels, inviting all stakeholders to participate, creating a shared view on the division of responsibilities, and sharing data and research knowledge all are ingredients that cannot be foregone in the strategic task of eliminating all traffic casualties.

Setting the safety of the road users as the number one priority and creating design standards for the infrastructure in line with human tolerances have revolutionized the thinking of the safety community. The examples mentioned earlier of replacing crossing with roundabouts and installing median fences on higher-speed roads in order to avoid head-on collisions have proven to be highly effective. These redesigns in turn have opened up for vehicle manufacturers to modify their safety strategies and reprioritize some of their own safety targets.

Significant progress on traffic safety has also been made in other places, particularly in Western Europe. A number of countries, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Great Britain, have achieved impressive low numbers of traffic casualties.

The same progress is, however, not seen within all of the countries within the industrial world. On some of the major markets, it appears that the progress of reducing the number of fatalities has more or less stalled and is not meeting the government targets.

The EU is trying to push its low-performing member countries in adopting ambitious targets for the traffic safety.

For the USA, the highest numbers of traffic fatalities were recorded in the early 1970s. These numbers were around 55,000, i.e., the same as the number of US soldiers killed throughout the Vietnam War!

However, during the first part of the 2000s, the USA made some significant progress in reducing the traffic casualties, unfortunately, during the last couple of years, this trend has changed and is now rising again. The number of fatalities in the USA was as low as 32,000 in 2014 but is now back up to 37,000 again. This is indeed a cause for concerns.

For the developing world, the numbers of traffic casualties continue to rise. In many countries in Africa and in the Middle and Far East, the numbers of fatalities reach as high as between 25 and 35 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants.

The target of the UN Decade of Action 2011–2020 project was to save one million lives by suggesting a number of measures such as improving the safety of the road infrastructure, further improving the safety of road vehicles, and focusing more on road safety management and the leading killer of people aged 5–29 years. Most of the fatalities are pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. This is the case in particular for those living in developing countries. For the next Decade of Action, 2021–2030, road traffic safety is one of the goals: goal number 3, “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages,” with target 3.6, “By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents.”

Both from human suffering and a sustainability perspective, the global numbers for road fatalities and serious injuries are clearly not acceptable, and drastic measures are needed. In line with this, the targets for the next decade of action are dire and should be uncompromisable and require all stakeholders to be involved and contribute. As mentioned earlier, most fatalities are vulnerable road users, particularly in developing countries. Systematic planning of the safety improvements of the infrastructure focusing on VRUs and more efforts of the management of road safety in those parts of the world would potentially make a huge difference to the outcome for this category of road casualties. The major contribution of vehicle manufacturers, more pedestrian-friendly body structures, and benign exteriors are clearly beneficial and should be introduced for all new vehicles, and the legal requirements for the vehicle performance in the protection of VRUs and adopted by the UN ECE WP29 need to be adopted by all major markets globally.

The present trends among governments in developing countries, however, do not aim for this level of harmonization of vehicle safety requirements.

Vehicle manufacturers are also strongly encouraged to align their vehicle designs so as to meet the UN ECE requirements as a minimal level of vehicle performance even in countries who have not adopted any vehicle safety requirements.

Unfortunately, there is still a significant gap in the level of vehicle technology introduced in modern vehicles for developing countries as compared to industrialized countries.

This fact is something that is needed to be handled by both the governments and vehicle manufacturers. Governments may harmonize the vehicle requirements with those recommended by UN ECE, offer incentives for the introduction of new advanced vehicle technologies, and inform customers on the benefits of these systems, and vehicle manufacturers should voluntarily speed up the efforts of offering the safest vehicles on all markets.

However, even given the potential of further improvements to motor vehicle safety, the most significant challenges remain for improvements of the infrastructure, enhanced behavior of the road users, and road safety management, particularly in the developing countries.

Conclusions

The Swedish example of safe traffic management in the form of the strategic work linked to the Swedish Vision Zero is a very striking example of how successful such an effort can and should be. The citizens’ safety cannot and must not be traded in for transport efficiency or for economic reasons. The safety of humans must always be paramount in these efforts.

The actions already taken in terms of improving motor vehicle safety and infrastructure changes and applying a safe systems approach to transportation are clearly in a positive direction and will, over time, give a significant reduction in traffic casualties, but with the seriousness in the present situation, stronger and more drastic measures need to be taken rather hastily. All road traffic stakeholders need to cooperate and bear the burden of responsibility for actions leading to progress in aiming for the Vision Zero target in the number of fatalities and serious injuries globally.

It is encouraging, however, when viewing the efforts to systematically approach this situation by involving all stakeholders and the different initiatives that are coming from major international bodies like the United Nations and the European Union.

In spite of the tremendous improvements in traffic safety during the last decades, the present global situation with approximately 1.3 million fatalities is deeply concerning. Since transportation is the backbone of modern society, many hesitations remain on behalf of some stakeholders on how measures for improved motor vehicle safety may affect the transportation flow and efficiency. However, by creating a collision-free traffic environment, with significant less friction in the system, this will create huge benefits by improving the flow of goods and the well-being of road users. Transportation research also clearly show that improved and efficient transportation goes hand in hand with improved vehicle safety.

Among those contributions are making safe and reliable products with the latest advancements in motor vehicle safety and knowledge that are distributed so as to benefit all markets and all road users globally, sharing important research data related to real-life traffic situations and sharing real-time data recorded by the vehicle and related to traffic safety, using safe and sustainable transportations related to all production and distribution activities, and cooperating with all stakeholders in moving safety forward.

Looking at all important players taking part in this effort and with their ambitions and the invested resources, together with the vastly increased knowledge from research gathered during the last decades and combined with the technological advancements and the future anticipated changes in the ways to use mobility in the future, the prospects to succeed with the Vision Zero target look promising and indeed inspiring. So, to us all within the global safety community, we are on a mission together, let’s do it!