Our objective is to provide our customers with vehicles that achieve high levels of vehicle safety for a wide range of people over the broad spectrum of real-world conditions.
Real-world safety data, research, regulatory requirements and voluntary agreements provide much of the input into our safety processes, including our Safety and Public Domain Design Guidelines, which are Ford's stringent internal targets that exceed regulatory requirements. Ford utilizes engineering analysis, extensive computer modeling and its crash-test facilities – including our state-of-the-art Safety Innovation Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan and the Volvo Car Safety Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden – to evaluate the performance of vehicles and individual components. These evaluations help to confirm that our vehicles meet or exceed regulatory requirements and our even more stringent internal guidelines.
Ford and Volvo are working together toward the development and introduction of new crash avoidance features. For example, the new 2007 Volvo S80 is equipped with our Collision Warning with Brake Support system, which was jointly developed in Dearborn, Michigan, and Gothenburg, Sweden. Soon, Volvo will introduce our next generation of collision mitigation technology with autonomous braking (which slows a vehicle's speed in an unavoidable collision), Lane Departure Warning and Driver Alert (to monitor driver drowsiness). These technologies, as well as other advanced features such as Emergency Lane Assist, which automatically steers the vehicle into the correct lane under some conditions, are all being developed by the Dearborn/Gothenburg team.
