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Comment by nemesisj | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I was more impressed with their mission statement of "By 2020, no person will be killed or seriously injured by a Volvo". What an incredible goal! I hope they can achieve it.

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This is one of those things that can start in a small country that happened to have relatively rational politicians and at the time, two car manufacturers - Volvo and Saab. And they all managed to work together towards a common goal.

Saab Automobile is no more (sort of), but Volvo appears to be in a renaissance now that it's Chinese-owned (Geely) rather than American-owned (Ford). Ford sold Volvo to Geely in 2010, and since then Volvo has been working on their own platforms, first shipped in the new XC90. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Scalable_Product_Platfor...

More reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/nyregion/de-blasio-looks-t...

"The result has been a sort of social contract between state and citizen: If residents follow the most basic traffic laws, engineers can design roads to guard against all fatalities."

"'Design around the human as we are,' said Claes Tingvall, the director of traffic safety at the Swedish Transport Administration and a godfather of the Vision Zero plan."

https://legacy.tispol.org/interview-room/written-interviews/...

(In-depth interview with Claes Tingvall.)

Given how ahead-of-the-curve Volvo have been so far (e.g. outside air bags, automatic braking, etc.), I think they're well on track for that.

While they seem to be thought of as an old soccer-mom type car company, I personally think of them very highly.

I think the soccer mom image comes from their lack of "sport" focused cars. I looked at their lineup and saw nothing that looked "aggressive" or "sporty". All of the cars looked pretty even keel middle of the road "nice".

I believe this was a change in the last maybe 10 years. Before the current line-up of S40's and S60's, their cars looked almost offensively boring (to me); and, with ugly faces. With the new S40's and S60's, I think they are downright pleasant to look at.

This may be my perception of that particular coming out of an old generation of looks, and catching up to the current one, though.

There are a couple of sporty offerings [1] from their in-house tuning company, Polestar (like AMG for Mercedes, etc.). And the 240 Turbo is still a entry-level rally favorite in Scandinavia. You can easily get 300 bhp, 50/50 weight distribution, manual shift and rear-wheel drive in a '94 model for about $6000, then spend about $1500 prepping it for the entry level rally class. (There is an even cheaper rally class called "Folkrally", where there is a rule to keep the cost down that says at the end of the race, anyone can offer to buy your car for $1700, and you're not allowed to refuse or you lose your rally licence.)

[1] http://www.volvocars.com/us/cars/new-models/s60/s60-polestar

It could be argued that not building cars that look "aggressive" is a reflection of their culture of safety.

In my view, driving on public roadways should be maximally safe (and thus deeply boring); if you want to treat driving as a sport, then head to a track. Disclaimer: I own a Volvo :)

The V40 is a sporty looking hatch. Personally I think it looks amazing.

It goes back a long way too. The ubiquitous three-point seat belt was invented at Volvo. Rather than keep it for themselves as a competitive advantage, they opened the patent so everyone could benefit.

  > I think they're well on track for that.

Please tell me you are joking or at the very least you are a paid spokesperson for Volvo. This is a goal that the hammer division of Stanley Tools will never be able to accomplish; and they make a product that does not contain any logic circuits, its just mass at the end of a stick.

ADDENDUM: Nuance Elimination

In addition to the problem of "user error" I do not think that Volvo is going to be the first company that creates a 100% error free product design, operates a production line that never suffers from quality control issues and masters supply chain management to such an extent they never utilize faulty/defective components from third parties. Finally there is also the "Eve and Mallory" problem. Do we really need to have a discussion on HN about the likelihood of unhackable firmware/software?

Never seriously injuring or killing requires absolute perfection in every aspect of design and implementation. In my opinion merely entertaining the possibility of that level of perfection requires a terrifying amount of hubris.

It could easily contain logic circuits... Have you been under a rock with all the self-driving car news the past decade?

Are you saying that since a car is more complex than a hammer, and not even Stanley can control what the end user does with the hammer, therefore cars will always kill? Wouldn't the fact that Volvo's products actually have logic help them reach their goal vs. a hammer?

Easy, just put the mass at the OTHER end of the stick.

SOLVED.

And modern (three-point) seat belts! http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-inv...

> "By 2020, no person will be killed or seriously injured by a NEW Volvo"

The way things have been going lately for Swedish car manufacturers it seems very likely they'll achieve that goal, by simply going out of business before 2020.

Volvo's new XC90 got stellar reviews, and is selling well. And apparently they are redesigning the whole product line using their new product platforms [0]. I don't think they are going away any time soon.

[0] http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/by-2018-volvos-oldest-vehi...

I hope that achievement will be more than just "well, we put out the paint, but nobody used it!" they certainly need to go much further.

They said "by" not "in". Half jokingly, that means by 2020, nobody will be hit by a Volvo car, but the people inside might still suffer injuries if involved in an accident. That can mean the car AI might sacrifice the car passengers to save a pedestrian or cyclist.

Killing the passengers violates the "no person" part.

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