Sweden is a beautiful, amazing country -- between 2 and 4 p.m. on July 2. Otherwise, it's dark, cold, wet and deeply forlorn, a place of Norse hardship-as-honor, like the landscape of some old Led Zeppelin song.
Compared with the swelling, unrestrained fertility of, say, Missouri (where if you bury your dead cat in the backyard, by spring kittens will sprout), life in Sweden comes hard. It must be nurtured and protected. I believe that if you analyze Swedish carmaker Volvo's mothering, mad-with-safety corporate ethos, you would arrive at this bit of cultural anthropology. It's either that or socialism.
Recently the company announced a new goal: By 2020, its cars would be so safe that no one would die behind the wheel of a Volvo. This is a laudable ambition even as it is complete lunacy.
Really, Volvo, no one? We live in a world where people somehow manage to get their heads caught in their electric windows and drive into very large and prominent things, such as oceans.
The Norwegians. Sheesh. What are you going to do?
The Obama administration went all Swedish on us this week when it announced dramatically higher fuel economy standards to come into force in the next decade. These higher standards will mean a radical redefinition of safety, and Volvo's technology push is hitting the moment just right.
The new XC60 compact SUV includes the company's first generation of active collision prevention systems, called City Safety.
City Safety uses a laser-radar system to sweep the road ahead, scanning for stationary objects. At speeds under 20 mph, if the system senses that the driver is about to hit an object, it will engage the brakes up to 50% of maximum braking force.
At speeds under 10 mph -- assuming the driver makes no effort to avoid the collision -- the XC60 will stop short of impact. At speeds of 10 to 19 mph, the impact may still occur but the force will be greatly diminished.
Now, unless you happen to be picking your teeth with a loaded revolver, such accidents are not life-threatening. Even so, according to Volvo, these pitiful fender-benders account for 75% of all vehicle collisions, and they are certainly among the most miserable of insurance claims, simply because so high a percentage of the repair cost is the out-of-pocket deductible.
I should also note that much of the high-strength boron steel used in a Volvo can't be just bent back into shape by a repair shop; the pieces have to be cut out and thrown away. That's one reason a 15-mph front crash can run over $10,000 to repair.
It's not hard to image a time a decade from now when such accidents are a rarity because most cars will have what might be thought of as electronic bumpers. And then, how will the sons and daughters of body shop owners afford their summers on Balboa Island?
Volvo expects its cars will continue to reach out with millimeter-wave feelers to sense the road and react to emergent situations. The next generation of City Safety probably will work with the active cruise control so that a future Volvo would slow from 60 mph to a dead stop to avoid a collision if the driver is not paying attention (Mercedes-Benz's system works like that).
Other possibilities include technologies that would use global positioning system data to analyze the road and, if the driver is going too fast, will automatically brake, thus helping avoid an off-road shunt. With information from the traction control system, rain sensor and frost sensor, the car could also modulate speed to account for inclement conditions.
Lane-departure-warning and lane-keeping technology (where the car reads the road and helps the driver maintain what's called "lane discipline") are both available on the Volvo and are now fairly common in the premium/luxury segments.
Such systems are obvious precursors to a sort of autopilot. Soon cars will be able to talk to one another through vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V), enabling them to pack more closely on the freeway, saving time and fuel and making the best use of available roadways.
Similar communications would enable cars to chat with the infrastructure itself in a way that might, ultimately, prevent crashes at intersections, which is the species of accident that is most difficult to eliminate.
Why have I taken you down this terribly safe and dull road? Because the Obama administration's proposed new rules for vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions will create an impasse between our need for fuel efficiency and our desire for increasing automotive safety.
Eventually, manufacturers are going to have to take weight out of vehicles to wring more mileage out of them, and that means relying on less steel and more electronics. Volvo, which as a brand has often seemed rather linear and dowdy, suddenly looks quite avant-garde.
