Volvo's $200m crash palace

By DAVID LINKLATER

This man kills Volvos. Not an easy job, but someone's got to do it.

Jan Harsjo is a crash analysis engineer at Volvo's Safety Centre in Gothenburg, a $200 million facility that boasts some of the world's most advanced crash-testing equipment. And lots of broken Volvos.

The centre has been open since March and is still being completed in parts. "We first talked seriously about a new safety centre 10 years ago," says Harsjo.

"But we decided that if it was to be done then we would make sure that there were no compromises. It was only five years ago that we decided to go for it."

Under the safety centre umbrella is everything from crash simulation to real-life accident investigation, but the centrepiece is the new crash laboratory, an imposing structure where two 100m-plus launch tracks converge in an enormous crash pad with a 14.5-metre high roof.

The two crash-test vehicles are propelled down the tracks with electric motors and 18mm steel cables.

Their positions are measured with millimetre-perfect accuracy by lasers, to ensure that they collide in the correct place. Once they are within a couple of metres of impact, the cars run free.

Tests are recorded by in-car and on-track sensors, and photographed from above, alongside or below by high-speed cameras.

Illumination is courtesy of 32 8000-watt lamps, which create conditions three times brighter than daylight. The bright colours of the crash cars assist the image-making process.

Just 125 tests are being performed per year at the moment, but Volvo's status within Ford's Premier Automotive Group as a centre of excellence for safety means that number will increase to 400 within a few years.

Computer analysis and crash simulations also play a large part. Volvo's NEC supercomputer sits in a climate-controlled room and is used to calculate how a car will deform in a crash and how its protective systems will behave.

Six simulated full-car crashes can be carried out in a 24-hour period, with the virtual cars broken into as many as 300,000 pieces, which can be examined on-screen.

However, it's not likely that simulations will ever replace real crash tests. "There are too many variables involved in genuine impacts to get things completely right on computer," says Harsjo.

"The main advantage with virtual reality is that we can cut down development times."

But the most important grassroots safety work is actually done through component testing - what happens when the human body collides with individual parts of car interiors.

"Most of our work is at this level," says Harsjo. "Only once you learn how components work individually can you start to add them together."