Science fiction? It is at present, but Volvo wants to make it a reality within a decade. It wants to build an uncrashable car and has set ambitious targets. "Our aim is to build cars that do not crash," says Jan Ivarsson, the company's safety strategy chief. "By 2020 no one should be killed or even moderately injured in a Volvo."  Even for a company with such a fine safety record, this is a tall order. The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.2 million people are killed and more than 50 million wounded in road accidents annually.  This was acknowledged by Volvo founders, Assar Gabrielsson and Gustaf Larson, when they said: "Cars are driven by people. Therefore, the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo is – and must remain – safety."  Volvo was the first car maker to fit safety cages to its cars, as well as laminated windscreens, three-point safety belts, lateral airbags and head protective air curtains, but even Ivarsson admits the uncrashable car is going to be tough to engineer.  To do it, though, there isn't a better qualified car manufacturer. It is 40 years since Volvo started to collate data on real-life accidents. Using information gathered by its own team of investigators, the insurance industry, the police and hospitals, it has studied more than 40,000 mishaps involving 60,000 cars. It's gruesome stuff, but Ivarsson says "It helps us understand what needs to be done."  He points out that any statistical qualification of "zero injuries and deaths" would need to be linked to average miles travelled and that it would be impossible to eliminate every eventuality of death or injury. A truck carries the weight and inertia of 30 cars and it would be impractical to build a car capable of surviving such a head-on impact. He suggests artificial electronic lanes that prevent cars and trucks crossing the central white line, but this sort of technology could only be introduced with government assistance.  Volvo has 10 years and two car generations to achieve its targets and is working on a number of technologies right now.  This EU-funded initiative is one of the most wide-ranging projects ever undertaken. Launched in 2008, the three-year European Field Operational Test (EuroFOT) has 28 partners, including MAN, Ford, Daimler, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, Fiat and Volvo, as well as tier-one suppliers (such as Bosch), universities and research centres. Costing €21.6 million (£17.6 million), it is 65 per cent funded by your VAT contributions.  That's the boring bit. The bonkers stuff is the data they're mining from a fleet of 100 Volvo V70 estates and XC70 SUVs that have been in the public's hands for four months. There are sensors on the steering, accelerator, brakes, side loads, following distances, cruise control, speed and what's in the blind spots. There's even video of the road ahead and behind, as well as the driver and passenger.  Some of the cars are wired to measure driver sweat rate, blood alcohol concentration and heart beat. It adds up to almost 100 terabytes of information for Volvo's crash safety researchers at the end of the year's test.  You might think you'd be intimidated by these Big Brother cars, but the sensors and electronics are well hidden and you drive pretty much normally.  I managed to break the Volvo factory speed limit, but that's nothing when you see the video of a crazy woman almost clanging into the barriers while chatting on a mobile phone.  Grouping cars together in fast-moving, electronically locked platoons has long been a goal of vehicle engineers. Volvo reckons fuel savings of up to 20 per cent are attainable if they can lock cars together at high speed, 3ft apart, but everyone from Mercedes to General Motors has been thwarted by the risks – including the fearsome threat of legal action in the United States.  Volvo is working with Shoreham-based engineering group Ricardo to investigate the possibility of using radar, WiFi and 3G phones to allow vehicles to find, join and leave such convoys in safety, while the front of each train would be controlled by a professional driver in a truck or bus, steering and braking according to road conditions.  The "drivers" behind can catch up on a little light reading, or surf the net, but "best not fall asleep," says research leader Mats Pettersson. Mercedes abandoned a system like this a decade ago, but the Volvo/Ricardo alternative looks promising.  A test vehicle is already able to steer itself behind a radar reflector in a laboratory. Test cars are expected to be running next year – it's a serious project and we'll report on progress…  This is where it really gets clever. Most collision systems protect you from one specific accident, such as a pedestrian impact. This uses the same sensors, but a super-smart algorithm also detects where each surrounding car is, draws a vector polygon around it to calculate speed and course, and figures out whether it represents a collision threat. Computers calculate which combination of brakes, steering or even acceleration would avert any potential collision and execute the manoeuvre as required.  Current positioning technology – such as satellite navigation and CD maps – is not accurate enough to allow such a system to work, but potential alternatives are being developed.  It's difficult to test any of these technologies on a public road, but that's where they will have to work if they are to save lives. Volvo has used a little bit of Hollywood-style computer-generated imagery to replicate circumstances that can be the cause of accidents.  Active safety systems manager Georgios Minos's team augments everyday street scenes with virtual pedestrians, suicidal cyclists and even rag-week students in chicken suits to see whether systems work as they should. The camera "sees" these virtual hazards on a screen in front of the vehicle and the software has to make the correct decisions, otherwise it's back to the drawing board…  Do you really want uncrashability?  Could there be drawbacks if Volvo builds such an unbendable beast? Apart from the sheer tedium of driving something that rebuffs any attempt at driver initiative, there's also the problem of drivers taking bigger risks because they perceive they are in a safer vehicle.  Ivarsson and his team have considered this and advocate better driver training, plus improved road design and car support systems.  "I think we should have even more involvement in the driving process," he says, citing technology such as the counter-steer support introduced two years ago on the Volkswagen Touran. This encourages drivers to steer correctly into a skid and thus helps to decrease emergency braking distances.  I'd started this research with some scepticism about the type of car that might result from Volvo's project, but Ivarsson and his team are refreshingly pragmatic. They seem to like driving, too, and most of their work places the driver at the centre of the decision-making process.  "We need to encourage better skills, better habits and better attitudes," Ivarsson says. "Attentive, active drivers are absolutely necessary if we are to achieve our goal of zero accidents."
Volvo has set itself the difficult task of building a car that can't be    crashed, but do we really want technology taking control?