Is Volvo guilty of car safety overkill?

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Volvo's Safety Concept Car prototype

By Zillah Bahar

(IDG) -- Can Volvo -- a car company renowned for high-tech safety -- do a better job of helping people avoid and survive serious accidents? The Swedish automaker already has made standard on all of its luxury passenger cars features that the auto industry considers to be the most important new safety innovations to date: side airbags and special head restraints to minimize whiplash.

"They've done the big things," says Adrian Lund, COO of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Which is exactly why the Safety Concept Car, a cannibalized orange-red S40 with eye-popping devices currently in development, could be construed as an exemplary case of gilding the lily. Sure the technology is cool -- in certain instances, even beautiful -- but the new features offer minor safety improvements compared with what is already available on the current crop of Volvos, according to Lund.

The imperative for designing the new features has been to keep the driver facing forward, building on the premise that one of the most important skills learned in driver's education courses -- looking over one's shoulder before making a lane change -- gives rise to a huge blind spot on the opposite side. Adding to this safety risk is that it takes a few moments for the eyes to refocus once they are retrained on the road ahead.

To address those problems, Volvo has installed a television screen in the middle of the dashboard of the Concept Car, which was shown in San Francisco last week. The screen displays a wide rear view and also provides maps and driving directions. When the driver signals to make a turn or sets the car in reverse, cameras built into the door mirror and the third brake light turn on automatically. The driver can then see what's going on behind him by glancing down at the 4-by-8-inch screen rather than turning around. Should the kiddies in the back seat be in the process of making trouble -- like removing their seatbelts when the car is in motion -- the driver can nip mischief in the bud because there's a camera trained on them as well.

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The car also has a sensor that finds the whites of the driver's eyes, information from which the car's computer system uses in order to automatically adjust the seat for optimal vision, as well as the steering wheel, floor and pedals for optimal ergonomic comfort. The computer can save that information about different drivers so that they are instantly accommodated whenever they take the driver's seat in the car.

Other safety features include radar sensors in the rear of the car and on the door mirrors that set off a distinct repetitive sound if another vehicle is approaching too fast, and an alarm that activates to alert a fatigued driver if the car begins to stray off the road. Beside high-tech devices, Volvo engineers have expanded the driver's field of vision by replacing the metal framing on either side of the windshield and between the front and back car doors with transparent Plexiglas. The company has also installed four-point harness safety belts. Designed to restrain the body at the hips and both shoulders -- as opposed to just one -- the new passenger belts are essentially adult-size versions of the belt systems found on most children's car seats.

The additional costs to Volvo customers for any of these new devices and designs has not yet been determined, says David Wagner, a safety expert with Ford Motor, which owns Volvo. In any case, it will be at least two years before any one of them will be offered as a standard or optional feature. For a car loaded with all of these features, the wait is about a decade.

The question is, do such features really provide safety benefits that could potentially save lives? The short answer is yes, but a qualified yes, according to the Insurance Institute's Lund, who says the added safety of these features is not particularly significant.

"The four-point harness would be protective, but not as big a benefit as it would have been before airbags," says Lund.

As for the devices and designs that expand a driver's field of view, "Whenever you make it easier to see, that helps," says Lund. "But I don't know of many crashes caused (by a driver's) inability to see, as opposed to the fact that someone forgot to look." Anyone could, just as easily, forget to glance at a video monitor.

What's more, Volvo customers of the future might find certain devices so complex or bothersome that they stop using them altogether, and in the case of the newfangled seatbelts, that would give rise to a serious safety risk, one that already concerns Volvo's safety team.

Nevertheless, whatever new safety devices or design improvements ultimately make it into Volvo cars are certain to be touted as major improvements, even if their actual benefits are marginal.

Since the introduction of airbags in the late '80s, "industry has understood that safety sells," says Maryann Keller, an independent analyst who has been following the auto industry for three decades. That is especially true for people drawn to the high-priced Volvo brand. "A customer who buys a Volvo," Keller says, "may find that incremental value is worth the cost simply because [he or she] already places a higher than normal value on safety."