Thursday, June 22, 2017

TWO YEAR OLD VIDEO SHOWING A VOLVO XC60 'AUTO BRAKE SYSTEM FAILURE' HAS BEEN GOING VIRAL AGAIN - VOLVO HAS RESPONDED

Volvo Car Malaysia has been recently made aware that there is a video with the title “Volvo’s auto brake system fails at launching ceremony… MD paralysed” has been circulating (again) on a lot of Malaysian social media and messaging apps. They have reached out to us motoring media here and would like to reiterate that in the depicted incident the Volvo XC60 was equipped with City Safety, but it did not have the Pedestrian Detection functionality. This is a separate optional system and would have been needed to mitigate or avoid the car colliding with the two men. Furthermore, the incident happened in 2015 (in Costa Rica, Central America). A long time ago in terms of autonomous technology.


Even if the car was equipped with this Pedestrian Detection feature, the heavy acceleration of the driver could have caused the system to be overridden and deactivated; our auto-braking (mitigation and avoidance) technology is highly advanced and in cases which the car detects that the driver intends to perform the action deliberately, it will deactivate itself. You can tell that the guy behind the wheel was overzealous. Really gunning for the 'test subjects'. 

And contrary to the title of the video, both men were alright and none of them were paralyzed nor were they a Managing Director(s) of Volvo Cars.

Volvo Car Malaysia strongly recommends its dealers, partners and customers to never perform test towards real humans. Maybe back in 2015 some Costa Ricans were a bit over confident (stupid or crazy would be too harsh...oops, I just said it here).

City Safety has been acknowledged to contribute to safer driving in heavy city traffic by avoiding or mitigating rear end collisions with other vehicles in low speeds by braking. The system is active in speeds up to 50 km/h. 

You can check out the video here. You can see the published date - 2015. It isn't new folks. Do take note. Move along folks.

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