Volvo says that the new EX60 is its safest car yet, and it has given some insight into what exactly sits behind the claim. 

In videos launched alongside the new EX60 in Sweden this week, the firm has given us some more detail about the complex work that’s gone into the car – including some unusual testing methods, like firing a prototype out of the company’s testing facility into a pretend tree.

Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo’s safety centre at Gothenburg in Sweden, said that the aim is for the car’s complex safety systems to avoid trouble in the first place, by steering and braking. “Sometimes crashes are unavoidable – that’s why we study how accidents happen,” she explained. 

Haglund said that Volvo designs its crash tests based on real world scenarios using data the company has gathered over many years – “it goes above and beyond any standardised testing.”

Interestingly, Volvo also goes beyond regulated testing by using female crash test dummies based on actual women's bodies, rather than the Euro NCAP standard that uses scaled down male dummies for women and children. 

Lotta Jakobsson, Volvo’s senior technical leader for safety, said that the EX60 had been designed so that the car body would “absorb crash energy and keep the safety cage as intact as possible” to help protect the occupants. 

The safety cage uses high strength boron steel to resist deformation, while the bits outside the cage are softer and designed to deform so that the energy dissipates in a controlled way.

​Volvo is also proud of its new world first ‘multi-adaptive safety belt’, which Åsa Haglund has described as a “major update” to the three-point seatbelt, which Volvo also introduced in 1959.

The adaptive belt system is able to treat each passenger differently based on their size and shape and assesses the potential impact to provide the best possible protection. 

It has 11 different ‘load limiting’ settings in the event of a crash, so that it can apply different levels of force. Not only that, but Volvo can use over the air updates to change the car’s settings as it gets more data. 

So don’t crash your new Volvo – but if you do, at least it won’t be quite as bad as it could've been. Want to find out more about the new EX60? Ginny has been to see it in Sweden. 

Not a shot from a bleak Scandi detective show on the telly, but rigorous analysis at the Volvo safety centre