More Than Luxury

Apart from having Abba and Annika Sorenstam, Sweden has Volvo. And, they have the XC90 T8.

- Patrick Ho

The evolution of mankind never stops.

Constant change and advancements in technology through new discoveries has advanced the world and affected everyone’s lives.

When the car was first invented, little did they know how far the automobile would evolve. To put it simply, the car is almost alive these days.

Scientific discovery and human curiosity has seen various safety inventions that keep car occupants safe in the event of a collision. The hefty investment in pursuit of this, and many crash test dummies being smashed have seen a drastic drop in road fatalities in developed countries over the years.

Much of these advancements are mainly due to Volvo.

In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin introduced the three-point safety belt in the series production PV544. It is believed that since Volvo waived its patent rights of this invention to benefit everybody that today, it has saved an estimated one million lives.

Other major automobile safety features introduced by Volvo were the Rearward Facing Child Seat (1972), Side Impact Protection (1991), Whiplash Protection System (1998), Inflatable Curtain (1998), Rollover Protection System (2002), Blind Spot Information System (2003), City Safety (2008), Pedestrian Detection With Full Auto Brake (2010), Run-off Road Protection (2014) and Connected Safety (2016).

Testing the Volvo XC90 T8 recently, I was comforted by the fact that these safety innovations would keep me safe if anything happened at high or low speeds.