That Volvo could go so horribly wrong on two occasions of its safety system demonstration is indeed a matter of surprise. The first occurred in the month of May and that time the s60 estate which was being proven went under the back of a truck. Now there was the second incident and this one in front of Australian journalist in Europe.
After the Chinese take-over of Volvo it appears that the usually safe Volvo is maybe headed for troubled waters?
The car has a pedestrian avoidance system installed in the car that controls the brake and stability of the car so as to reduce speed in close proximity of pedestrians. The system is aided by cameras installed at the nose as well as radars fitted in the car to detect the motion of the pedestrian. The system should therefore have detected the dummy placed for the test which it failed to do.
The system however had successfully detected the dummy on 75 percent of the trial runs. On study of the reasons for the failure on one occasion to detect the dummy it was found that one of the cameras did not work well in low intensity light.
The head of Active Safety Systems at Volvo , Jonas Tisell says , “The failure of the test was due to the dummy not being set up properly, and therefore it did not give an echo enough for the system. So the dummy was not relevant in this situation.”
The blame game could keep switching between the dummy and Volvo but the fact remains Volvo had once again faced an embarrassing situation.
Source: carscoop
