Volvo’s Car Child Care

The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has always been known for prioritizing the safety of their consumers. As stated by the founders of the company, Assar Gabrielsson and Gustaf Larson, “Cars are driven by people. The guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo therefore, is – and must remain - safety.”

The company has been researching and developing safety features for their vehicles for forty years now. During that span of time, Volvo has come up with breakthrough systems which increase the protection that their vehicles offer to their consumers.

According to the company, taking care of children inside cars is of utmost concern for them. Small children need special restraints which are specifically designed for their asize. According to the company, the needs of babies in terms of car safety are very different from that of grownups.

A grownup’s head accounts for about six percent of the total eight of the person. In comparison, babies’ head comprises about one half of their total weight. This hefty head is the weakest point of a baby. That is why it is of utmost importance that a baby should be harnessed to a child seat which adequately protects its head and other developing body parts.

Another concern is the developing pelvis of a child. This portion of the body cannot adequately anchor a seat belt in its proper position as easily as a grownup’s hips can. To ensure that the child will be safe in the unfortunate case of crash, booster seats should be provided for them. Booster seats are designed to fit a child’s body snugly. It also has specialized belt geometry which does not rely on the child’s hips to support it.

Not only babies should be protected carefully, unborn ones should be taken cared of too while a pregnant woman is in a vehicle. To develop safety features for pregnant women, Volvo uses pregnant crash dummies to study the effects of a crash in a pregnant woman. To date, only Volvo has engineered a pregnant crash test dummy in the industry.

The pregnant crash dummy is named Linda by Volvo. Linda is used to determine how a pregnant mother and the child inside the womb would react to various collisions. Aside from the physical attributes of a pregnant woman, Linda is also loaded with information about the uterus, placenta, amniotic fluid and the fetus. This helps safety engineers to study how a child inside a womb reacts to violent motions as a result of car crashes. The virtual pregnant Linda can be positioned in any way inside a car and the speed at which a car crashes can also be set by researchers.

With Linda, Volvo found out that pregnant women and their unborn child can e protected well by a front airbag. Volvo also found out that using a seat belt does no harm to an unborn baby. The company encourages pregnant women to always wear seatbelts to adequately protect their unborn babies.

With the advancements made by Volvo, they have become a leader in car safety. Their Volvo thermostat-equipped vehicles are known to be some of the safest in the world. With their accomplishments, Volvo is keen to develop more safety features to reduce fatalities caused by traffic accidents.