Volvo itself drops brand new cars from a height of 30 meters. Not the best way to handle a new car, but it is useful to see how it looks after a serious accident.
Normally you can leave the complete destruction of cars to the men and women of Euro NCAP. However, Volvo has found a way to reduce cars even more thoroughly to a lot of scrap. Lifting a car to a height of 30 meters with a crane and then crashing it several times on the ground appears to be effective. Of course not because Volvo is now so keen to destroy new cars, but to help emergency services further. According to Volvo, a fall from that height is good for considerably more damage than a regular crash test. We can imagine that. The Swedes simulate how a car looks after a very serious accident.
According to Volvo, it is not so much concerned with the safety of its own cars, but with the deployment of emergency services. A car that has been knocked to the ground several times from that height is obviously seriously twisted. Emergency services can then work with their hydraulic tools to see how they could reach the occupants as effectively as possible. “We really wanted to present them with a challenge,” said Hakan Gustafson, chief responsible for Volvo’s road safety division. The findings of the Swedish emergency services are reported and made available to worldwide emergency services.