Volvo’s ingenious but slightly contrived under-bonnet pedestrian-friendly airbag seems to have been a short-lived development in the world of car safety, and one that reaches the end of the road rather early in its life, as electronics and crash-avoiding sensors become better and more widespread.
Australia’s Go Auto says the news comes straight from the manufacturer’s senior vice president, Lex Kerssmakers, with whom they spoke on the sidelines of the Tokyo motor show.
The high exec expressed his (company’s) view on the matter: “I am not even sure if we will continue with the bonnet (airbags) because it’s not necessary, SUV is a pretty high car… It’s also there for the pedestrians and they need to land soft but if the car is high, they land soft anyhow. So no, at the moment no.”
He is referring to this type of airbag making it into their next big model to be launched, the 2015 XC90, the all-new version of the hugely popular SUV. The brand’s City Safety array of sensors is deemed enough, while the pop-up bonnet becomes irrelevant. Granted, the tech will move on in two more years’ time, so it will be even more capable of avoiding a crash than it is nowadays, when it already knows if a cat, person or bicyclist has cut your path.
Another noteworthy piece of information spilled by Kerssmakers was the automaker’s strategy of moving from diesel-electric hybrids, to the more conventional gasoline-electric setup used by pretty much everybody else. I hope they change their mind, as their current offering seems like one of the more appealing every-day hybrids on the market today, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to see it refined further and (positively) associated with the Volvo name.
By Andrei Nedelea
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