Volvo turns to video games while developing safer cars

Friday, 20 November 2020

Not only does Volvo let its employees play on a simulator during work hours, it encourages it. For safety.

Volvo’s new mixed-reality driving simulator sounds like an easy way for workers to have a quick game over lunch but really it is helping the carmaker improve its safety and autonomous driving technology.

The set-up comprises a moving driving seat, a steering wheel with haptic feedback and a virtual reality headset. Fairly typical for the well-off gamer but Volvo has added a full-body ‘Teslasuit’ that provides haptic feedback from a virtual world, while also monitoring bodily reactions.

The Teslasuit’s minute vibrations allow testers to physically feel small reproductions of the forces one would experience in a crash, while experiencing no actual risk. The suit also enables Volvo’s engineers to test these reactions by studying how muscles, stress levels, and heart rate react under stress, and apply this learning in creating the next generation of safety systems aimed at avoiding and mitigating risky situations.

It looks like he’s just playing a game on his downtime but this guy is actually working, testing upcoming safety features for Volvo.

Volvo’s engineers aren’t using it to set lap times around Brands Hatch either, they simulate real cars on real roads in order to gain important insights on the interaction between people and the car for development of new safety, driver assistance and autonomous driving features.

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The ‘Teslasuit’ uses haptic feedback (minute vibrations) to simulate the forces felt during a car crash but on a much smaller scale.

* Watch as Volvo drops cars from a crane to save lives

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Another way Volvo tests its safety systems is by dropping cars from a crane.

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When developing safety systems for cars, like collision-avoiding technologies, testing is crucial. But physically testing these systems can be dangerous, time-consuming and expensive. Virtual and mixed reality simulations, however, allow for perfectly safe testing in authentic environments, without having to build any physical prototypes or set up complex scenarios.

Testers can be exposed to new active safety and driver assistance features, upcoming autonomous drive user interfaces, future car models and many other scenarios. It can be used on digitally recreated real test track roads or in the test lab and every scenario is fully customisable.

Another way Volvo is testing its safety systems is dropping cars from cranes.

In what Volvo says is its “most extreme crash test ever executed” it has dropped a bunch of cars from 30 metres to allow rescue services to “prepare for any possible crash scenario and to simulate the forces that erupt in the most extreme crashes, beyond what can be simulated with ordinary crash testing.”

“Normally we only crash cars in the laboratory, but this was the first time we dropped them from a crane,” said Håkan Gustafson, a senior investigator with the Volvo Cars Traffic Accident Research Team.

“We knew we would see extreme deformations after the test, and we did this to give the rescue team a real challenge to work with.”

A total of ten Volvos were dropped from the crane several times and the company says that all findings from the crashes and the resulting extrication work will be collected in a research report that will be made available for free to rescue workers around the world, allowing them to further develop their life-saving capabilities.

Playing video games and dropping cars from cranes in the name of safety? Good to see that Volvo is having fun in its pursuit of safer cars.