The day Adam hit a moose, his XC60 kept him unharmed

It’s an early November morning on a wintry road near Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden. Adam Dresh, a father of two, is driving to a business meeting in his Volvo XC60 with a colleague beside him. A snowstorm has reduced visibility considerably.

Suddenly, emerging from a snowdrift after an oncoming truck, a 400‑kilo moose steps straight onto the road from the left.

There’s no time to react. The car strikes the animal at leg height, and it ends up on the bonnet, partly across the windscreen.

"For more than 15 years, I’ve been driving across Sweden and around Europe, but mostly here in our subarctic landscape," Adam explains. “Over the years, that’s meant plenty of close calls, with sweat pouring and adrenaline surging – from wildlife on the road to near collisions with trucks. I’ve been lucky, but luck only goes so far, which is why I’ve always driven a Volvo.”

Safety is never about luck

The front of the car was badly damaged, yet its strong safety cage helped protect Adam and his colleague, allowing them to walk away without a single injury.

Right after the accident, Volvo On Call, part of Volvo’s connected services, was automatically triggered – connecting Adam with an operator and sharing the car’s location so help could be dispatched immediately.

You might say they had angels watching over them on that blizzard morning. But a more tangible reason why they’re still alive is of course the safety features in the car they were travelling in.

Because at Volvo Cars, safety is never a matter of luck. Behind every Volvo car stands the relentless efforts of thousands of engineers and experts, all driven by our unwavering commitment: to help protect the lives of our customers who trust us on the road.

Since the real world is far more complex than standardised test environments, we set our own safety standard – based on decades of real-world knowledge since the 1970s – above and beyond regulations and safety ratings. We call it the Volvo Cars Safety Standard.

Guided by our pioneering standard, we validate our new cars in a wide range of scenarios, including large animal impact, frontal pole impacts, run-off road situations, roll-over accidents, car-to-car crashes and impact at various speeds and angles.

Rigorously engineered for real-world safety

After the accident, Adam writes a letter to Volvo Cars to express his gratitude for the safety technologies that helped save his life.

"Thanks to the car, my children still have their father, and my wife still has her husband. I want to thank everyone at Volvo who helped develop the XC60," Adam writes. “After what we experienced, I know for certain that I’ll be driving a Volvo for the rest of my life.”

Five months after that morning, when for a moment Adam believed he might not survive, he is invited to visit the Volvo Cars Safety Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden to witness a crash test with a moose dummy in a safe and controlled environment.

In this rigorously prepared scenario, a Volvo XC60 once again collides head‑on with a heavy “moose” – one of only two moose crash test dummies available in the world developed by the Swedish research institute VTI.

Tests like these are exactly what we do every day in our world-leading crash lab. On average, we’ve crashed a brand-new Volvo every working day for decades.

Here, our engineers and experts can recreate almost any accident in the real world, turning our data and insight from real-world accidents into innovations to help make Volvo cars safer.

Safety innovations rooted in Sweden’s wildlife reality

In Sweden alone, more than 73,000 car accidents involving large animals were reported in 2025*. As a Swedish brand, we have been developing safety systems to help protect people in large animal impacts since the 1980s.

Built on decades of real-world knowledge, we’ve also pioneered technologies that help prevent such collisions in the first place. We started introducing the Large Animal Detection in Volvo cars in 2016 as part of our active safety technology. It builds on our earlier innovations for pedestrian and cyclist detection and is designed to help detect, warn about and, if necessary, automatically brake for large animals on or near the road.

The system combines real-time data from the car’s exterior sensors and smart algorithms to help identify the shape, size and movement patterns of large animals, such as moose, elk, boar, deer and reindeer. This allows the car to distinguish large animals from other objects and assess the risk of a collision in real time.

Large Animal Detection is just one example of the holistic safety approach that helps make Volvo cars some of the safest cars on the road. From helping to protect occupants to preventing collisions, every system is designed with real-world safety in mind. And the innovations keep coming, constantly evolving with one clear purpose – to help better protect you and your loved ones.

* According to statistics from viltolycka.se