![]() To face German rivals BMW, Mercedes and Audi head on with two new vehicles every year and a target of 800,000 car sales globally by 2020. The company has taken a completely new approach to its brand positioning, engine design and manufacturing. Of course, that number is a lot more tangible now.Its latest vehicle, the seven-seater XC90, is the first product resulting from an ambitious $11bn investment. And it’s an even and nice number - nicer than 2021, or 2022! So it was a nice number, far away enough so that it was challenging but not impossible, and close enough that it was tangible.” What the Vision 2020 statement says to those of us who are working on it is, ‘We do not accept that you risk your life or limb just by transporting yourself.’ That’s the attitude that we have toward this project.” And why 2020 as the target year? “Back at that time, it was fairly far away in time, but close enough that we could relate to it. “We've always been working with an ambition of leadership in safety,” Thomas Broberg, a Volvo senior engineer explained to me, “and in the early 2000s, we decided that we wanted to change our attitudes as to how we were working with it. It's out of these circumstances that Vision 2020 emerged. Suddenly, Volvo finds itself needing to defend its leadership position against bigger companies, with more resources. New Lexus vehicles use radar to map out surrounding traffic and car speeds for the driver. Mercedes-Benz has been rapidly developing driver assistance systems, including ones that detect driver drowsiness. It’s a status worth preserving, but the competition is heating up. The seatbelt buckle on the XC90 vaunts Volvo's safety cred: "Since 1959" refers to the company's introduction, that year, of the three-point safety belt. But none of them have been so significant as to shake the company’s “safe car” status - and Nichols told me that company executives are routinely reminded of it through group readings of thankful letters from customers who survived car accidents in their Volvos. “Volvo could never do a massive car recall.” Technology Communications Manager Jim Nichols told me over dinner after the first day of test driving, “because consumers know us as the safe car company.” Of course, Volvo has done their share of recalls. Volvo’s entire reputation is founded upon safety, and the company knows it. A Volvo recall anywhere approaching that number would totally sink the company, and no t just because it would absorb their entire production (Volvo sells approximately 500,000 cars annually). Remember that rash of car recalls last year? GM alone recalled more than 2.5 million vehicles throughout 2014. So I asked, and I got some answers, and here I share them with you: where the idea for Vision 2020 came from, how Volvo plans to make it happen, and how it has already changed the cars that they are building. I got the opportunity to ask them in February of this year when Volvo invited AskMen to another press event: a test drive of their new XC90 in Barcelona. I had a lot of questions to ask about Vision 2020, which I had first caught wind of at a Volvo press event last summer. And my own suspicion was heightened by the fact that there’s very little mention of this declaration a search for “vision 2020” on Volvo Cars’ international site yields no results (though a post on the Volvo US YouTube page declares the full promise). For the Swedes to declare that their own death count will drop to zero over the next five years. ![]() That’s a welcome drop, but h ardly a dramatic one. I mean, no deaths? Car safety continues to improve: the most recent numbers available from the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) showed that 10% fewer Americans were killed on the road in 2012 than had been in 2008. That’s what you could call a bold promise - and the kind y ou’d expect to be accompanied by an asterisk, or some small print. This is the core promise of the Swedish auto company’s “Vision 2020” safety program. Five years from now, it will be impossible for you to be killed or seriously injured in a car accident… providing that the car you are in is a Volvo.
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