Volvo Cars’ Industry-First Connected Safety Technology Can Now Alert Drivers of Accidents Ahead

You’re driving down a winding country road. It’s impossible to see beyond the road in front of you. Suddenly, your Volvo car alerts you: there’s been an accident ahead. As you calmly decelerate and come around the next curve, you see a crashed car in your lane. Thanks to the warning, you were prepared and could react proactively.

With our new Accident Ahead Alert, we introduce another pioneering connected safety feature in Volvo cars: for the first time, cars can immediately alert drivers of accidents ahead using real-time traffic management centre data. It will be available in compatible Volvo cars in Europe, starting from Denmark.

To help drivers avoid collisions and traffic congestion caused by an accident ahead, the feature is designed to instantly alert the driver about a traffic accident up to a few hundred metres ahead. The location data is provided by national road authorities and compatible cars, starting with other Volvo cars.

“Using our groundbreaking connected safety technology, our Accident Ahead Alert can help Volvo drivers avoid unpleasant surprises while contributing to making roads safer for all,” says Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo Cars Safety Centre. “Thanks to our collaboration with the Danish Road Directorate and other partners in the Data for Road Safety ecosystem, we can introduce this new feature and continue our leadership in safety innovations.”

Volvo Cars’ industry-first connected safety technology, introduced in 2016, uses Volvo Cars’ cloud based on real-time data. It allows Volvo cars to communicate with each other and alert drivers of nearby slippery road conditions and hazards. In the same way, drivers can now be alerted to accidents ahead regardless of the time of the day.

We plan to integrate more traffic data shared by other partners in the European Data for Road Safety ecosystem, including national traffic management centres in different countries and cars from other brands.

To make roads safer for all, we call for more road authorities to share anonymous traffic accident data and encourage other car makers to join us in offering similar technologies. Volvo Cars has been committed to sharing connected safety data for others to integrate into safety features and will continue doing so.

“We’re happy that Volvo Cars, as the first car maker, has started using our new real-time traffic event data feed,” says Stine Bendsen, head of the Danish Traffic Management Centre at the Danish Road Directorate. “A quick alert about an accident ahead gives the driver more time to slow down and increase the distance to the car in front. This helps to lower the risk of follow-up collisions and protect the people working to clear the road.”

For Volvo car owners, it’s easy to contribute to road safety by opting for data sharing: activate it using the “connected safety” option in your car’s centre display. The vehicle will then be able to alert the driver of an accident ahead by using the hazard light alert in the dashboard and, if available, the head-up display. Only the essential information will be shared with other cars, and the data will be anonymised to ensure your privacy.