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Volvo Cars celebrate the 50th anniversary of the standard-fit three point safety belts, which appeared for the first time on a Volvo PV544 delivered Thursday August 13, 1959 to a Volvo dealer in the Swedish town of Kristianstad.
Transcript
Host: This year, it will be 50 years since Volvo safety engineer Nils Bohlin designed the three-point seatbelt. One of Volvo’s most important innovations and almost certainly the most important invention in the whole history of traffic safety. Thomas Broberg: It’s a technology that’s reckoned to have saved more than million lives and I think it will continue to save, really more in the coming years. It still has a great potential, specifically looking at usage. So, it’s had a tremendous effect for sure. Host: Nils Bohlin realized at an early stage that both the upper and lower areas of the body must be securely restrained with a belt over the chest area and another over the thighs. The greatest challenge was to create a solution that was both simple and effective as it had to possibly access and fasten the seatbelt with one hand. A great many tests were required before it became possible to apply for a patent for the three-point seatbelt. Lotta Jakobsson: At that time, many people were very scared, hesitating about how to be restrained the best way. So, it was very strong decision to implement this in cars. Host: The effectiveness of the three-point seatbelt quickly spread throughout the whole of the motor industry and car world. Thanks to the fact that Volvo very quickly made Bohlin’s patent available to other car manufacturers. Matthew Avery: Well, seatbelts is the most important safety flies fitly to any vehicle today and since its inception, we’ve seen literally hundreds of thousands of lives saved with it’s—and it really represented the very beginnings of modern vehicle safety. Adrian Lund: It’s saved literally thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of lives around the world and what’s been particularly important about it is it made it easier for people to protect them in cars by one motion that they could buckle up. In the United States now, we’re seeing probably the 15000 people a year whose lives are saved just by the active buckling up their safety belts. Host: So in 1959, the three-point seatbelt was introduced a standard equipment in the Volvo Amazon and the PV544 on the Nordic markets. And Volvo thereby became the first car manufacture in the world to fit seatbelts a standard. Thomas Broberg: To get the message through it, to convey the world that this is actually something good with something that took a lot of effort from Volvo and Nils Bohlin. They did a world tour demonstrating it. They did stunts. They did all these tests, showed all these data but it took a number in years before the general public and also, the different governments around the world were persuade that this is really a good technology and this is something that we should enforce which happened during the 70s and 80s. So, I think that’s a recognition that the working process of Volvo established at that time that’s giving effect. Host: Bohlin’s invention was deemed to be so important that the German patent’s office declared it to be one of the eight patents that have had the greatest importance to mankind over a 100 year period from 1885 to 1985. There are few people who have saved so many lives as Nils Bohlin and today’s traffic researchers absolutely agree. Matthew Avery: 25 years ago, the UK started mandatory belt laws whereby you have to use a seatbelt, required by the law and since then, apparently 45,000 lives have been saved and what we saw in the UK is one life is saved everyday by wearing a seatbelt. Host: In 2009, the seatbelt is still the most effective protection in a traffic accident. Those cars and seatbelts are of course, considerably better today. And here at Volvo’s Safety Division, they’re continually working to further develop Nils Bohlin’s exceptional invention. Lotta Jakobsson: The next generation of safety belt would be improved safety belts. It would be the same principle where you load the occupant and the most strong parts of the body. It will be more adaptive, adapted to the size of the occupants and crash severity and more user friendly. Adrian Lund: Well, the use can be improved. We still have a substantial portion of people in the US who are buckling up and as a result, we believe that if we can get everybody buckled up, we could save another 5000 lives a year. These 5000 deaths that we could prevent if everybody would just buckle up. now, what can we do to achieve that? One of the key things we can do I think is to have an effective reminder system in cars where the car will electronically remind you if you haven’t buckled up that safety belt by some noise that you would like to turn off. The other thing in the US we need to do is we need some better laws. The way we’ve gotten most of our population to buckle up is through safety belt use laws. Thomas Broberg: If you look at the three-point safety belt 50 years ago compared to the three-point safety belt today is a huge difference. The basic principles are still there. You can put it on using one hand. It has a good geometrics holding the upper body and the lower body but if you look at the specific technologies with pretentioners, load limiters, pre-prepared restraints, all of that, that’s been a significant development of the safety belt and the restraint itself and that era will continue. We’ve been looking at four-point belts, etc. But whatever we will do will still have those basic principles that were established by Nils Bohlin 58-59.
