Volvo unveils a smarter seat belt, heading into production in 2026

The new multi-adaptive safety belt from Volvo is a redesign of the three-point seat belt in all of today’s cars which brings smarter technology that adapts to the person it is protecting and the type of crash the car is involved in.

For the new belt Volvo has upgraded the load-limiter with more settings, including an increased number of load-limiting profiles, up from three to 11.

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The new safety belt uses data from the car’s various sensors, allowing it to select the correct level of tensioning depending on things like the passenger’s body posture, and the car’s direction and speed.

As an example, Volvo says the system can select the highest load setting for a large person involved in a severe crash in order to reduce the chance of head injury. However, it will choose a milder setting for a smaller person in a less severe accident to minimise the risk of fractured ribs.

Calibration for the system was done using data from the automaker’s database of 80,000 people involved in real-world crashes over the past 50-plus years.

The multi-adaptive seat belt system can be updated via over-the-air updates as more data comes in, and Volvo’s engineers fine-tune the settings, although the automaker doesn’t say how often it expects updates to roll out.

The first car to use the multi-adaptive safety belt will be next year’s EX60 all-electric SUV.

Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo Cars Safety Centre, said: “This marks a major upgrade to the modern three-point safety belt, a Volvo invention introduced in 1959, estimated to have saved over a million lives”.

Although the company patented the creation by its own Nils Bohlin. it permitted the design to be used by other automakers for free, allowing it to appear in cars of all shapes, sizes and weights.

Spurred by ever-increasing deaths on the road, Victoria made seat belt use mandatory at the end of 1970, with all other Australian states following suit by 1972.

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