More than any other nation, Sweden is associated with safe vehicles. With the move towards active safety technologies for preventing accidents, Sweden has maintained its role at the forefront of innovation.

Target: zero casualties

The national safety consciousness is summed up in Sweden's Vision Zero, the revolutionary road safety initiative which aims to reduce to zero the number of fatalities and serious injuries on the nation's roads. Vision Zero and its new way of thinking about traffic safety are now being copied extensively around the world.

Sweden is home to both cutting-edge research into the causes of traffic accidents and the state-of-the-art technologies for minimizing their effects and preventing them. Foreign investors are offered the ideal environment for pursuing the vision of safer roads everywhere.

Crash prevention through research

At the SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Center in Göteborg, 22 partners from the public and private sectors and academia collaborate on analyzing all aspects of how and why accidents and injuries occur so that technologies can be developed to prevent them. At this international hub, the research is divided into four programs: pre-crash, crash, post-crash and traffic safety analysis.

Real-life safety

Volvo Cars in Sweden has one of the world's most advanced automotive safety test facilites where more than 160 technicians and engineers are working towards the company's extremely ambitious safety target. "Our vision is that by 2020 no one should be killed or injured in a Volvo," says Hans Nyth, director of Volvo Cars Safety Center. "And our long-term objective is to have no collisions at all."

To achieve these goals Volvo's safety specialists not only carry out crash simulations and test components and systems, but also investigate real-life crashes, analyzing them and recreating them in-house.

Volvo recently tested a new sophisticated safety technique - Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake och Pedestrian Detection - in Copenhagen City.