Volvo and safety go together like peanut butter and jelly. From the rolling bricks that were 242’s to today, if there is only one word to describe the cars turned out by the company, “safe” is it. Volvo is so concerned with safety in their vehicles, in fact, that they want to eliminate vehicular deaths and injuries in their vehicles by 2020. And with systems like adaptive cruse control with vehicle detection, they have been making a dent in that number lately.
Volvo’s next feature is a system that determines if a left turn (right turn, for the Japanese and English) is unsafe. If an oncoming vehicle is 500 feet or less, the car will ignore your inputs and keep the vehicle from turning, and will alert the driver.
From our standpoint, while the idea of a safe car is one we can back, the idea that the car will decide what’s best, and not the driver, doesn’t work for us. For example: How will the car know if I’m taking the lesser of two evils? I could make a quick turn and risk a possible T-bone by a Geo Prism, or I could sit in the intersection and get rear-ended by a Freighliner. Hmm…we like our odds against the Geo. But we wish Volvo well…after all, the tests of their automated braking system worked out well.
(Cover picture courtesy of Volvo)
The collision wiper activation system worked fantastically. We couldn’t be more happy.
This sounds like a sincere attempt to fix stupid.
500ft ? at what speed? The cars will be safe because they will not be moving.
How about the car in the right turn lane and me pulling out for a city street left? I’ve been within 50ft,hell 15ft, of cars coming toward me and pulled out and went on my way and nobody was concerned.
The last time I went to a Spurs game if 2 of those cars happened to be in the parking lot nobody would go home.
When will they come up with a system to jam cell phones while in the interior of the vehicle or the system to pull the heads from drivers asses!!
How do some people make it through a day being as lost as they are?
Quote: “When will they come up with a system to jam cell phones while in the interior of the vehicle or the system to pull the heads from drivers asses!!
How do some people make it through a day being as lost as they are?”
I wholeheartedly agree that these two fixes are at the top of the list of safety things to fix.
Sadly, some company would sell a chip to override such a fix…..
how about after their heads are pulled out of their asses, the cell phones are jammed up there instead? I’d like to see an override for that