You said Volvo, meaning just the brand. You didn't specify the model. This car isn't even for sale yet, so there won't be any safety tests any time soon, obviously.
The article is about the XC60. But I was not clear. My mistake. But as you say, it was not tested yet so nobody can tell if it will be safer than any other car.
If you do your homework and read up about Volvo Cars and their philosphy towards safety, you'll find it educational I am sure. Volvo doesn;t just make cars safe for the testing, they are made safe in terms of real life driving situations. You can take from that whatever you like.
BTW the Euro NCAP has awarde the XC60 5 star safety rating.
I know their philosophy ,I had 4 Volvo and was once a ''Volvoman'' . But again, in 2009 Volvo, are not safer than subaru, VW, acura, mercedes, audi. If you go on any of these company site they will say that safety is a priority. If you find one car company telling '' in our philosophy we dont care about safety '' just tell me!
I perfectly know that Volvo puts great effort toward safety, it is their only sales pitch. They should do the same toward reliability , fuel efficiency ( the T6 engine is quite thirsty and their diesel is not available in north america) and espacially customer services that ,in my experience, is less than mediocre. They should also be realistic and lower their price.
Volvo must open their eyes and stop denying their problems. Their sales plunge by 63% in USA and 47% in Canada, about the worst score in the car industry. Their must be good reasons isn't it?
Presently Volvo cars are very bad investment. You gonna pay it way to much, in two years they gonna lose half of their value ( again about the worst score in the industry) and you probably gonna have problems.
So Volvo stop surfing on your past reputation and do something!! We want to find back our invincible, good value for the money Volvos
You make a valid point regarding Volvo's reliabilty scores of recent
http://thecarfanatic.com/wordpress/2008/08/08/2008-vehicle-dependability-study-by-jd-power/ which has to be dealt with.
As far as stating which car company builds the safest cars, well this is an impossible issue to factually prove.
But I have not seen or been able to find any other car company that goes to the lengths that Volvo cars does in its study of real life driving situations
http://www.canadiandriver.com/articles/ly/crash.htm , etc.
I also agree with your pricing problem Volvo North America has had since IMO 2005.
Before 2005, from my personal experience I found Volvo cars pricing to be very attractive in the sense that Volvo Canada offered the customer a base trim car with an array of stand alone options. Making it possible to build or personalize the car exactly as you choose, which in turn the customer could choose how much money to spend or add on to the base MSRP.
Volvo Canada discontinued selling their base trim S60 and V70 which were price around $36,000 so the cheapest entry level S60 all of sudden was over $40,000. This personally was the killer for me.
In 2005 Volvo N.A. makes some very big changes to the buying procedure and starts to simplify (for Volvos benefit) the option list, and use bundle option packages, much the same way the competition had been selling their cars.
And here is were Volvo N.A. gambled and lost their main core customers, whom bought Volvo's again IMO because they were a Swedish car, with unique differences, stylewise, dynamics wise, pricewise etc.
Volvo forgot its roots of being a safe, durable, reliable, small producing car maker, to a select few quirky customers, and tried to play BIG and lost.
Edit - just found this interesting article were Toyota is suing Volvo over claims of producing worlds safest car (XC60)
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/2182808/postsDoes this mean that Volvo will somehow be forced to prove this market slogan for the XC60?
