Safety for life… and freedom: Humans at the heart of the machine

Sixteen years ago Volvo set out a plan: ‘No one should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car.’ But it’s not yet proved possible to deliver. So now the carmaker is increasingly focusing on the people inside the car – putting humans at the centre of its safety technology program.

That means more cameras and sensors inside Volvo cars. The data collected has to be treated carefully, with other carmakers coming under fire earlier this month.

But Volvo Cars safety boss Thomas Broberg is at pains to reassure drivers that internal cameras are used as sensors – and the data collected is ones and zeroes – anonymised and deleted.

Data privacy concerns, he told Which Car? magazine, are “a stumbling block we need to overcome. If you look at the first generation of the system we have right now, it’s working with data instantaneously so we don’t have anything that is collected. Even though cameras are used as sensors, it’s not taking footage. It’s basically measuring, so you have ones and zeroes. They’re used in time and then erased.”

“We have a long history of working with sensitive individual data in our research, more than fifty years of working with the Traffic Accident Research team, so we have a culture of high integrity. Also working with how we make the data anonymous so it can only be used by a small amount of people within our organisation to do the research and nothing else.”

Volvo Cars is now ramping up its marketing globally to underline that safety requires a better understanding of the drivers inside the car as much as the external factors that can be mitigated (including navigating Kangaroos in Australia by using radar and cameras to react in hundredths of a second, and by more recent integrations such as Google’s HD Maps, which give both car and driver a better picture of the road ahead).

Per the new campaign, the carmaker is “stepping into a new era – for safety and for Volvo Cars – where our ambition isn’t just to protect your life. It's to help you live your best life. Because when you feel safe, you can be truly free”.

It’s a powerful message built on trust and Volvo Cars’ 95 years of safety-focused design. With consumer trust, Volvo Cars aims to turn the ones and zeroes from its sensors to zero fatalities and major injuries.

See the campaign, and Volvo Cars’ latest safety innovations, here.