汽车对驾驶员来说已经更加安全，但行人已经付出了代价。沃尔沃想改变这一点

汽车撞车，人们受伤了。这是一个围绕2吨汽车建造的世界的现实，可以高速行驶。但根据详细database of tens of thousands of car crashesin Sweden that the Volvo has been keeping since the 1970s, who gets hurt in these crashes is changing—and it’s forcing the automaker to rethink what car safety means.

“Because a lot of the development in the past years has led to a lot safer car-to-car crashes, people don’t get injured as often when a car crashes with another car,” says Mikael Ljung Aust, senior technical leader at Volvo’s Safety Center.One studycomparing crashes in car models from the 1980s against those from the 2010s found that the newer cars had a 22% lower risk of injury and a 66% lower risk of death. When it comes to car crash injuries today, car-to-pedestrian and car-to-cyclist crashes are taking up a larger portion of the database. “It’s the new challenge,” he says. “We need to deal with vulnerable road users.”

Volvo’s goal is to design car safety features that can better protect pedestrians and cyclists, including everything from auto-braking technology that detects people as well as other cars to still-nascent systems for nudging drivers into avoiding driving behavior that could be dangerous to people on the road who aren’t protected by the cage of a car’s steel frame.

这样做依靠更多地了解影响行人和骑自行车者的坠机事件。从大约10年前开始，沃尔沃开始扩大其数据库，其中包含有关沃尔沃崩溃的信息，超出了典型的汽车到车情况。交通安全数据分析的沃尔沃纳琳娜·林德曼（Magdalena Lindman）表示，使用保险和警察报告以及对汽车司机，乘员，受害者和证人的采访，详细介绍了这些坠机事故的情况。她说：“对于我们所在的哥德堡附近发生的撞车事故，我们实际上对每次撞车事故进行了更多调查。”“我们去坠机现场。”

For these crashes, Lindman says, the research team at Volvo can create in-depth case studies, sometimes even turning them into macabre animations that the engineering teams can use to guide their work. “We can see this is really what happened and we can design a system for it,” she says.

Though some of these crashes are unique to the conditions of Gothenburg or Sweden in general, many offer lessons for what leads to a crash that could happen anywhere in the world. “If you break your arm, it breaks the same way whether you’re in the U.S. or you’re in Sweden,” Ljung Aust says. The database is helping to show ways that these kinds of injury-causing accidents, wherever they occur, can be avoided.

Ljung Aust says many cars now have technology that can prevent some crashes, including auto-braking and collision-avoidance systems, and these can and are being adapted in Volvos through algorithms and LIDAR systems that detect pedestrians and cyclists and respond accordingly. “Steering around a cyclist isn’t rocket science,” he says.

The bigger issue when it comes to car-to-cyclist injuries is drivers trying to overtake cyclists and passing too closely. Compared to an auto-braking system that prevents a rear-end crash on the highway, this kind of aggressive or poorly judged driving behavior is more complicated to prevent.

As many advocates would note, one straightforward path to reducing these kinds of crashes is reducing the number of people driving around in cars, especially in places where the presence of cars automatically makes other road users vulnerable. This clearly runs counter to the business of car companies like Volvo, which are unlikely to start calling for their own demise. Technology has a role to play, and well-meaning car companies can help by making their inherently dangerous products safer, but it’s likely up to policymakers to pursue urban planning and regulatory decisions that limit the domination of cars in public spaces.

目前，汽车安全可能需要开始专注于推动驾驶员做出更好，更安全的决定。这是一个由欧盟资助的项目中探索的概念，该项目可以检测驾驶员何时昏昏欲睡，并使用汽车的显示屏为他们提供礼品卡，如果他们停下来并停止在一定时间内停止驾驶。礼品卡是用来的，直到驾驶员停下来之前才透露多少礼品卡。A test of the technologyfound that the nudge worked 87% of the time.

This kind of incentive-based system may not be exactly what’s needed to change driver behavior, especially when drivers are attempting a dangerous pass of a cyclist. “The mechanism is slightly different, because what is going on is more like a refusal to acknowledge that this situation is a bit different than what [the driver thinks] it is,” Ljung Aust says. In terms of protecting vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists, the nudge concept is in its early days, he notes.

And just because car-to-car crash injuries are down doesn’t mean Volvo and other carmakers can let up on their more traditional safety measures. “That’s an ongoing challenge that we can’t back down from,” Ljung Aust says. But as the toll of injuries shifts to people outside of those cars, the challenge is becoming even more complex.

“我们的视力为零死亡，在沃尔沃内部和外部受伤，” Ljung Aust说。“我们将始终尝试到达那里。我们不能保证我们会准确地将其钉在超级驾驶中，总会发生怪胎发生，但是考虑到该目标，只要人们仍在崩溃，您总是可以在任何给定的情况下做得更好。”而且，只要在我们的建筑环境中允许汽车的首要地位，他们就会崩溃，人们将受到伤害。