Ten brand new Volvo Cars became crash test dummies in their own right as they were dropped multiple times from a crane from a height of more than 30 metres.
Before each drop, Volvo Cars safety engineers made exact calculations about how much pressure and force each car needed to be exposed to, in order to reach the desired level of damage.
The most extreme crash test yet carried out by the brand was designed to help first responders and extrication specialists prepare for possible scenarios such as a car hitting a truck at high speed or when a car takes a severe hit from the side.
Volvo Cars says in such situations, people inside the car are likely to be in a critical condition. Therefore the priority is to get people out of the car and to a hospital as quickly as possible, using hydraulic rescue tools known in the industry as the ‘jaws of life’.
Extrication specialists often talk about the golden hour: they need to release and get a patient to the hospital within one hour after the accident has happened.
“We have been working closely together with the Swedish rescue services for many years,” says Volvo Cars traffic accident research team senior investigator Håkan Gustafson.
“We have the same goal: to have safer roads for all. We hope no one ever needs to experience the most severe accidents, but not all accidents can be avoided. So it is vital there are methods to help save lives when the most severe accidents do happen.”
All findings from the crashes and the resulting extrication work will be collected in an research report. It will be made available free of use to rescue workers elsewhere, allowing them to benefit from the findings and further develop their life-saving capabilities.
Usually, rescue workers get their training vehicles from scrapyards. But these cars are often up to two decades old. And in terms of steel strength, safety cage construction and overall durability, there is a vast difference between modern cars and those built fifteen to twenty years ago.
New Volvos are made of some of the hardest steel found in modern cars says the manufacturer.
It says this makes it crucial for rescue workers to constantly update their familiarity with newer car models and review their processes, in order to develop new extrication techniques.
These training sessions can mean the difference between life and death. So at the request of the rescue services, Volvo Cars decided to step things up a notch.
“Normally we only crash cars in the laboratory, but this was the first time we dropped them from a crane,” Gustafson says. “We knew we would see extreme deformations after the test, and we did this to give the rescue team a real challenge to work with.”
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