Volvo Cars celebrates 60 years of sharing safety knowledge

Volvo Cars is for the first time making its safety knowledge easily accessible in a central digital library, which it urges the car industry to use in the interest of safer roads for all, it has been announced. The announcement “symbolises the company’s philosophy of boosting safety through sharing knowledge that helps saving lives and comes on the 60-year anniversary of what may have been the most important invention in the history of automotive safety, the three-point safety belt,” according to a statement issued in Doha by Domasco, the exclusive distributor of Volvo Cars in Qatar.Faisal Sharif, managing director, Domasco, said: “Volvo possesses unrivalled safety credibility and is renowned for its contributions to societal progress. For decades, new safety technologies have developed in the Volvo Cars Safety Centre to ensure that the cars are as safe as they can be for what happens in real traffic. The tests go beyond the ‘average person’ represented by crash test dummies, and are enhanced to protect all people, regardless of gender, height, shape or weight.”  “The Project EVA initiative embodies the sharing tradition of Volvo and helps improve traffic safety for everyone. We are proud to be Volvo’s partner in Qatar and provide our customers with the safest cars on the road,” he added. Introduced by Volvo Cars in 1959, the three-point safety belt is estimated to have saved over 1mn lives globally, not just in Volvos but also in numerous other cars, thanks to its decision to share the invention in the interest of improving traffic safety. Since then, it has continued to prioritise societal progress over financial gain alone, the statement notes.To celebrate this milestone and to underline that its sharing tradition goes beyond patents and physical products, Volvo Cars now launches Project EVA. The initiative embodies and celebrates 60 years’ worth of sharing research into car safety with the world, but also highlights a fundamental issue with inequality in terms of car safety development.Project EVA illustrates, based on Volvo Cars’ own research data as well as several other studies, that women are more at risk for some injuries in a car crash. Differences in for example anatomy and neck strength between the average man and woman mean that women are more likely to suffer from whiplash injuries.