Volvo wants to make Knight Rider for real by 2020

Well at least when it comes to its passenger safety because it's not really interested in making the car of the future talk. Volvo wants to make such a secure car that when it comes to an emergency it will be able to steer, brake and find out about the road ahead from within a vast electronic bumper. And if all goes according to plan, its driver and passengers will escape even the most serious crash unhurt. Volvo is far from the only player in what Claes Tingvall, the Swedish road administration's head of traffic safety, calls the biggest revolution in the auto industry since the seatbelt. Volvo is working on pedestrian safety as well, the 2020 goal centers on those inside its vehicles. Borrowing principles from industries like aviation, the matrix of systems Volvo and other carmakers are working on will interact to start crash prevention and mitigation hours, rather than milliseconds, before impact. As recently as January, some 77 percent of U.S. consumers polled by Consumer Reports ranked Volvo as the safest car brand. Should all this fail to avert a crash, the car takes steps such as tightening its seat belts and priming air bags to minimize injury. The car of the future will have even more foresight. Radar, sonar and other sensors will extend its so-called "deformation zone" until it becomes, in essence, a huge electronic bumper reaching out on all sides to gather information to feed back to the vehicle. In a crash situation, where many drivers freeze, the car will be able to take over and steer or brake on its own. Reducing pre-impact speed by 15 km an hour would halve the road-death rate, according to Tingvall, so self-braking is key. In the very long run, Volvo's Ivarsson said, we may all drive the ultimate vehicle: the uncrashable car.

The Swedish car maker once sat comfortably at safety's apex. Besides the three-point seatbelt invented by its then head of safety in the late 1950s, the firm also pioneered crumple zones, side impact air bags and rear-facing child seats.

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