Volvo Cars Celebrates 60 Years Of Sharing Safety Knowledge With Open-For-All Digital Library

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.

The announcement symbolizes the company’s philosophy of boosting safety through sharing knowledge that helps saving lives and comes on the sixty-year anniversary of what may have been the most important invention in the history of automotive safety, the three-point safety belt.

Introduced by Volvo Cars in 1959, the three-point safety belt is estimated to have saved over one million lives globally, not just in Volvos but 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 prioritize societal progress over financial gain alone.

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To celebrate this milestone and to underline that its sharing tradition goes beyond patents and physical products, Volvo Cars now launches the E.V.A. Initiative The initiative embodies and celebrates sixty 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.

“We have data on tens of thousands of real-life accidents, to help ensure our cars are as safe as they can be for what happens in real traffic,” says Lotta Jakobsson, professor and senior technical specialist at Volvo Cars Safety Centre. “This means our cars are developed with the aim to protect all people, regardless of gender, height, shape or weight, beyond the ‘average person’ represented by crash test dummies.”