‘Be careful, an accident!’: how forward-looking cars can save your life | Car

Volvo will soon supply the Accident Ahead Alert system in models that came onto the market from 2016 onwards. It works quite simply: as soon as the car receives a signal that a traffic accident has occurred further along your route, a message appears on the Volvo’s dashboard. This means that you as a driver are alerted to a dangerous situation sooner, so that, according to experts from the car brand, you can anticipate what is happening in front of the car earlier (and therefore better).

Although similar functions already exist in various mobile apps, including Flitsmeister, and various navigation services, Volvo claims to be the first car manufacturer to build such a system into the car itself. Thanks to Accident Ahead Alert, the risk of unsafe traffic situations is drastically reduced, according to the car manufacturer’s safety experts.

Asa Haglund heads Volvo Cars Safety Center in Sweden and was closely involved in the development: “In a way, Accident Ahead Alert helps to look further into the future. The sooner you know when behind the wheel that you need to slow down, the better. For example, this prevents you from having to swerve at the last minute, with all the consequences that entails. Our studies also show that the risk of a so-called ‘follow-up accident’, for example a rear-end collision because someone notices crashed vehicles too late, is clearly reduced.”

The system that the Swedish car brand has developed with a number of external partners – unfortunately the brand does not reveal which parties they are – uses so-called Vehicle-to-X communication, or V2X for short. As soon as a car is connected to the internet (then the car industry calls it a connected car) it can theoretically exchange information with other ‘smart’ cars, but also with ‘hard objects’ such as buildings. Thanks to a built-in modem, the vehicles can also receive digital information remotely from various authorities.

The number of connected cars is increasing rapidly: cars from Mercedes-Benz, the Hyundai Motor Corporation and models from the Volkswagen Group, among others, have V2X on board. These companies also use the technology to allow vehicles to communicate with each other, or, for example, to predict how long ‘smart traffic lights’ will remain red. Volvo itself has been using the phenomenon since 2016; Currently, the brand’s models can already ‘inform’ each other about slippery weather conditions, for example, provided you give permission for your (location) data to be shared. Haglund: “There are already half a million Volvos with that functionality on the road.”

According to Asa Haglund, Volvo’s further developed system goes further than other systems already available, especially in terms of safety, because Accident Ahead Alert also processes information from traffic management centers in real time. “To ensure that the drivers in our cars only receive a warning when it is really necessary, our information must be as complete and reliable as possible. Of course you don’t want to receive unnecessary notifications; This is distracting and, in the long term, causes users to take the warnings less seriously.”

That is also the reason, Haglund explains in conversation with our car editors, that the Volvo system will first only be introduced in Denmark. There the brand works together with the Danish Road Directorate and other partners, who join forces in the Data for Road Safety network. “We have established that the Danish traffic monitoring system is technically mature and that we can therefore guarantee quality assurance. We need the correct information for the system to work properly, and the road manager must be able to share this with us without errors. We start in Denmark, but although I cannot give a date yet, the Netherlands will follow as soon as possible.”

The announcement of Volvo’s latest system comes at a striking time. Recently, the originally Swedish company has come under increasing criticism, especially about the choices it makes in the field of safety. For example, in the new EX30, the popular compact SUV developed under the wings of the Chinese parent company Geely, the instrument panel in front of the driver’s nose has been cut away. A head-up display is also missing. As a result, as a driver you have to take your eyes off the road unnecessarily often to see how fast you are driving, and that miss has already attracted a lot of criticism, including from our car editorial staff.

Faced with these complaints, Volvo safety expert Asa Haglund reacts combatively. “I also read that some people think Volvo is losing its focus on safety. Let me put it this way: Volvo will never lose its focus on safety. We have always been committed to making the safest car we can, and we continue to pioneer that field. We are committed in every possible way to a safer situation inside and outside our cars.”

In that sense, Haglund agrees, you can see the new ‘online safety systems’ as a kind of digital version of the three-point seat belt that Volvo patented in 1959. “Our brand immediately shared that innovation with the rest of the automotive industry and that would also be an optimal result for Accident Ahead Alert. This is really a system that we don’t want to keep to ourselves: the more people involved, the better it becomes. To make roads safer for everyone, we are asking more road authorities to share anonymous road accident data and encouraging other car manufacturers to jointly offer similar technologies.”