patrik’s volvo v70 saved the entire family
The sun was shining, the road was straight, and the traffic was running smoothly. An oncoming car on the straight highway swayed onto the wrong side of the road, Patrik Englund had no time to swerve his car in the opposite direction. The collision was violent but Patrik and his family miraculously managed to escape without serious injury. "Our Volvo V70 kept its promise. I drive the same car model today" comments Patrik.
The accident occurred at approximately 3pm on Sunday afternoon, 4th March 2007. Patrik Englund, his partner Emilie and two-month old son Lucas were driving along a highway, the speed limit was 70 km/h and the road was monitored by cameras, near Hyssna, some way inland east of Gothenburg. They were on their way home from viewing a house. Patrik noticed that the oncoming car, a small SUV a couple of hundred metres away, started to move closer to the centre of the road. "I didn't think too much about it initially. Oncoming cars usually adjust their course quite quickly but when it crossed the centre marking and drove straight at us is when I realized that things were going very wrong", recalled Patrik.
“Despite the head-on collision there was minimum injury to passengers, this is because the body of a Volvo is designed to absorb the shock upon impact” explains Roula Beiruty, Marketing Manager Volvo Cars ME. Although Patrik slammed on the brakes and almost managed to stop his Volvo V70, it was too late and the oncoming car drove straight into the front of his car.
The collision was violent. But the front of Patrik's V70 was deformed and absorbed most of the collision forces- the passenger compartment remained intact. Patrik in the driver's seat was protected by the pre-tensioned safety belt and the airbag. He suffered a crack to his twelfth vertebra but was otherwise uninjured. After three months with support for his chest and back he had recuperated. His partner Emelie was wearing the three-point safety belt in the middle of the rear seat. She suffered a fracture to one of her knees, which hit the centre console between the front seats. Emilie was on crutches for six weeks and has now recuperated. Little Lucas, then two months old, sat facing backwards in his baby seat that the family had borrowed from the child welfare centre. He survived unharmed apart from a bruise on his arm. Today Lucas crawls around just as quickly and enthusiastically as his little friends.
Although Patrik Englund's Volvo V70, a 2000 model, ended up on the scrapheap he did not think twice before buying a new car “I still drive a Volvo V70. You don't take any risks after having suffered such a violent reminder of the importance of choosing a really safe family car, I chose to remain safe and stick to Volvo" explains Patrik.
Volvo Car Corporation has worked intensively on developing systems that can help prevent this type of accident. During the course of 2007, Volvo produced two systems, ‘Driver Alert Control’ which monitors the cars movement on the road and warns tired drivers who lose concentration and ‘Lane Departure Warning’ warns the driver when the car strays across the center or side markers for no apparent reason. If the car which smashed in to Patrik’s had these systems installed, the entire accident could have been prevented all together.
