Volvo Smartens Up The Seat Belt, The Thing It Invented In The First Place

Volvo, the company that gave the world the three-point seat belt (Literally. Look it up), has reinvented the technology for the modern age. Whether the company will give the technology to all and sundry again remains to be seen, but it’ll appear first in the company’s upcoming EX60, due in 2026.

The “multi-adaptive safety belt” has plenty in common with the less intelligent versions most of us use. It’ll buckle across the chest, clip in around your hip, and probably start an annoying chime if you forget to buckle it in and attempt to drive. But that’s not all Volvo’s canvas strip is capable of.

Volvo feels the tension

According to the company, the seat belt system “can use data input from interior and exterior sensors to customise protection, adapting the setting based on the situation and individual’s profiles, such as their height, weight, body shape and seating position.” This adjusts an increased number of load limiters — the thing that tells your belt how hard to lock and when — to provide bespoke safety to users.

How an accident happens and who it happens to will have an effect on how the seat belt system works. A rugby prop in a head-on collision will have a different load profile to, say, a horse jockey who has just rolled their car. A heavier driver will be more aggressively locked than a smaller person, while some responses attempt to prevent specific injuries, like broken ribs, where possible.

Volvo’s new seat belt technology draws on crash data from more than 800,000 impacts, about fifty years of research, and will also improve over time thanks to over-the-air updates. That last bit we’re a little less thrilled with — imagine Microsoft sending out a software update that sends millions of PCs into a boot loop (this has happened) and you’ll understand our trepidation. Still, given Volvo’s reputation for driver and passenger safety, we’d expect this innovation to be handled with similar care.