The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Crash safety in focus for families
New tech focused on collision avoidance is a beacon of hope, says Ed Wiseman
Alittle more than 60 years ago, Swedish manufacturer Volvo made one of the most significant decisions in the history of industrial design. Its patent for the three-point safety harness, an invention developed primarily by its engineer Nils Bohlin, would be made public, enabling all other car manufacturers to include the harness in their cars.
It was a momentous act of philanthropy for which Volvo and Bohlin are celebrated to this day. There’s no way of knowing for certain how many lives the seat belt, as we now know it, has saved since 1959, but it’s estimated to be in the millions. Descendants of the original invention are fitted by law to every car on sale in Europe, and continue to make travel safer all over the world. It’s a piece of safety technology that almost everyone will have used at some point.
Softer dashboards, crumpling bumpers, roll cages and headrests became important parts of car design in the wake of the seat belt’s success, helping to mitigate the injuries caused to occupants during a collision. Later, airbags were tentatively introduced, before becoming standard features in most of the developed world. Crumple zones, which absorb the impact of an accident before it reaches the passenger compartment, became the norm. It was one of the first big steps in making cars safer.
Euro NCAP was formed in 1996 as an independent car-crash test centre. You can still find videos of a lot of those early assessments on YouTube, many of which are faintly terrifying to those of us more used to modern machinery. Models such as the first Volkswagen Sharan and Nissan Primera, at the time fairly up- to- date family cars, now seem so primitive, and the Rover 100 truly frightening in a frontal collision. It’s amazing to think anyone survived the first century or so of road travel.
More recent crash tests – also available on YouTube, if you’ve got nothing else on this morning – tell a slightly more reassuring story. Crashing a car is unlikely to be a pleasant experience, but modern vehicles undergoing Euro NCAP’s latest, most strenuous tests are worlds apart from their flimsy, driver’s-sideairbag- only ancestors. The slowmotion collisions are almost balletic, many thousands of components moving as one, a symphony contained in one half of a noisy, brutal second.
But that’s not the main difference between the safety technology of today compared with that of 20 or 50 years ago. For the past decade, attention has shifted further from mitigating the severity of impacts and closer to the avoidance of crashes altogether. Cars are expected to be aware of the risks around them and accurately convey that information to drivers. They should be able to detect and keep track of the car in front, signalling to the driver if they’re approaching too fast or even automatically braking if a crash is predicted by the on-board computer. Cars should be able to stay in their lane if the driver does not. Increasingly, collision avoidance is the focus.
And long may this trend continue. The computational power of your Skoda Octavia is far beyond anything that could have been imagined in the late 1950s, when early seat belts were hewn from steel and geometry. Now, even cheap cars have the ability to perceive their environment quickly enough and in sufficient detail to step in when a human is about to hurt itself or another.
I’ve always found car safety to be a small, dim beacon of hope in a world that is otherwise on fire. There are good people in the world, and good people don’t like it when other people die; the invention of autonomous emergency braking is testament to that fact. And while there are lots of arguments against buying a new car, against scrapping older vehicles, against the environmental impact of bringing yet another car into the world, I think that safety – which, let’s be honest, is what matters most – is one very good reason to make the upgrade. Countless Euro NCAP videos will provide more details as to why.