Volvo Aiming for Absolute Safety

If the ownership of a car can tell anything about the individual, it appears that buying a Volvo will soon mean more than sleek designs, high degree of safety and high income. In this article appearing in the IHT, Volvo has just announced that it has taken on the daring challenge of ensuring passengers in its cars of zero injury or mortality by 2020. The ambition is impressive but thinking from the perspective of one appraised of principles of economics in addition to an understanding of human behavior, I think that this must be viewed with delightful skepticism.

I question this because to make an absolute safe car may be altogether feasible through cutting-edge engineering but I suspect that it is not possible to make it an affordable and reasonably operable machine. As reported in the story, a Swedish government officer doubts that this can be fully achieved. If this attempt could systematically reduce the levels of mortality worldwide from 1.2 million per annum by a significant factor, then that would be success. Studies have shown that vehicle mortality rates tend to be a higher in countries where affluence is creating a first time cohort of drivers where the infrastructure is insufficiently prepared for those numbers. I expect that injuries from traffic accidents would continue to rise as more people acquire new motor vehicles in lower income countries. Since it is unlikely that they will be buying Volvo's, the car maker will still be producing very safe cars but they will not be what everyone drives.