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Volvo V60 vs Human Crash Test Dummies in Morphsuits

Want to see a Volvo go head to head with five human crash test dummies? Well you’re in the right place. We wanted to test the effectiveness of Volvo’s Pedestrian Detection System, so we drove a 1.5-tonne V60 estate towards five petrified human beings without ever applying the brakes to see if it would sense the danger and stop automatically.

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If this sounds incredibly dangerous, that’s because it is. Volvos are among the toughest cars on the planet and there’s only going to be one winner if it collides with soft flesh. However, Volvo’s Pedestrian Detection system is able to scan the road ahead using a combination of lasers, radar and magic pixies to find human or cycle-shaped objects. If it detects one, it will slam on the brakes without any driver intervention to prevent a catastrophe.

Or at least that’s the theory.

To see whether the system works in the real world, we persuaded five dummies (humans in crash test dummy Morphsuits) to line up in front of our shiny new Volvo V60 estate and drove towards them at varying speeds. We started with five, as this provided the largest, most detectable target, and gradually whittled them down until only one, quivering, be-Morphsuited dummy remained.

Will the V60 stop in time? Will the dummies survive? Will we have a lawsuit on our hands? There’s only one way to find out. Watch the video!

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