​​Future car technologies will help combat high death rate on the roads Recent car accident statistics is totally frustr…

​​Future car technologies will help combat high death rate on the roads

Recent car accident statistics is totally frustrating. And the majority of the road accidents are caused by driver misbehavior.

As a recognized leader in safety, Volvo Cars has analyzed a huge amount of data on car accidents and revealed the three key factors that affect safety on the roads. These factors constitute the so called ‘gaps’ in the company’s ambition to completely end serious injuries and fatalities in its cars.

The first one is the well-known problem of speeding. Data from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (USA) shows that 25 per cent of all traffic fatalities in the US in 2017 were caused by speeding. But how is it possible to make drivers stick to speed limits? The Swedish car maker proposes a radical approach: it will limit the top speed on all its cars to 180 kph from 2020. The cars won’t simply go faster.

Two other problems are intoxication and distraction which often fail to be an impediment for drivers, as the aforementioned statistics from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (USA) say. The cause of 30 per cent of all fatal car accidents was the driver intoxication.

And for these hard-to-eliminate problems the company proposes a range of measures. Starting from early 2020s all the cars will be equipped with special cameras that will be constantly monitoring driver behavior and register deviations such as eyes closed or insufficient steering. In this case, driver assistance systems will be activated to intervene. That intervention could involve limiting the car’s speed, alerting the Volvo on Call assistance service and, as a final course of action, actively slowing down and safely parking the car.