Volvo smart seatbelt adjusts itself based on your weight and position for increased safety

Hamilton Spectator

6 days ago

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN—Canadian safety researcher Peter Frise agrees that the three-point seatbelt that Volvo patented and brought to market in 1959 has likely saved more lives than any other automotive safety feature. So when Volvo upgrades this vital feature next year by introducing a new smart seatbelt, it's potentially major vehicle safety news.
Volvo plans to introduce what it calls its 'multi-adaptive safety belt' next year, which will debut in its all-electric 2026 EX60 SUV.
Volvo didn't yet confirm its plans for its futuristic seatbelt beyond the EX60 at the tech's debut at Volvo's Safety Centre in Gothenburg, although officials were very clear that throughout its history, new safety features were quickly spread throughout its lineup.
Frise, a University of Windsor professor of mechanical engineering, who specializes in automotive safety research, says that the company has always had an impressive safety focus, being key in side and curtain airbag development as well.
So how exactly does Volvo's new high-tech smart seatbelt work? It starts by pulling in data from sensors inside and outside the vehicle, including ones that measure passenger weight, size and position on the seat. These inputs are run through a computer, and combined with camera, steering wheel and pedal data. The information comes together to provide a detailed analysis of what the driver is seeing and responding to, and compares it with the potential dangers it sees approaching.
Once a collision occurs, modern seatbelts use what's called 'load limiters' to cap the amount of force the belts put on the body, which, after their initial tightening, then release slightly on each torso to help prevent injuries. Volvo's current seatbelts offer two or three possible 'profiles' or degrees of load-limiting, based on the basic parameters it can currently read and adapt to in a split second.
The upcoming smart belt will raise that to 11 different load-limiting profiles, taking more interior and exterior data into account, and fine-tuning its response to account for different physical characteristics. So a larger and heavier occupant will receive a higher belt-load setting in a serious crash to increase head protection, while a lower speed crash with a smaller person can reduce that belt load setting to minimize the risk to the passenger's ribs.
'We see data as the new safety belt,' said Aders Bell, Volvo's chief engineering and technology officer. 'We've gone from a place where we were in a data desert, to now we're in a data Niagara Falls.'
The adaptive belt provides more tailored protection to the seat occupant, with a wider scale of load-limiting variations — and these can be expanded later or fine-tuned via over-the-air updates.
This will make Volvo's upcoming vehicles, which are capable of more computations and more comprehensive over-the-air updates, even safer, whether through updates to the adaptive belts or with tweaked active crash-prevention features, said Bell.
'This is how we level up on saving lives.'
Volvo arranged a demonstration crash test at the Safety Centre here. It was one of roughly 150 to 200 crashes planned at the facility each year. Digitally, of course, there are many more, with Volvo staff estimating that the latest EX90 was crashed more than 80,000 times virtually.
The two-part crash test demonstrated an EX90 SUV that used its active safety system to brake in time to just kiss (perhaps unexpectedly) the orange nose of another one pointed in the opposite direction. After that, the target car was violently T-boned in the side by a third EX90 at 55 km/h, sending it leaping into the air, and roughly two lanes over.
But the most harrowing part of the tour of Volvo's safety facility was one I couldn't photograph. It's where the company keeps some Volvos involved in severe crashes. The carmaker reports all the drivers survived, and provided the company details of the crashes, all in Sweden, so that the carmaker could study the vehicles and their safety.
The safety systems have been reducing injury rates for decades. The percentage of Volvo owners injured in crashes is down from 10 per cent in the 1970s to just over two per cent between 2010 and 2019. The injury risk for men and women is now evening out. It used to be much higher for women, but an expanding family of crash test dummies and more diverse research has helped change the technologies leading to the improvement, said Åsa Hagland, head of Volvo's Safety Centre.
It's too early to tell if Volvo's adaptive seatbelt, set to arrive in 2026, will become a safety system that is mandated within a decade as the original safety belt was.
'There's no way that other companies are not looking at this,' said Frise. 'So it's very likely that these will start in higher-end vehicles and then gravitate to lower models, and then someone in the regulatory framework will say 'Hey, this is a really good thing,' and make it mandatory.'