Traffic safety is a fixation in Sweden. At 450,000 square kilometres, the country is about the size of Newfoundland and, like the Rock, 70 per cent of that is wilderness. It has a population of fewer than nine million, putting it somewhere between Quebec and Ontario in that sense. Yet it has two native car companies, Volvo and Saab, both with an international reputation for vehicle safety.

It starts from the initial design stages. Peter Horbury, who now heads up Ford's domestic design team, once explained the difficulty for designers when appearance takes a back seat to safety. "Turn the key in a BMW or slam the door in a Mercedes and you know immediately where your money went. A Volvo driver has to have the worst experience of his life -- a severe crash -- to appreciate our efforts," he told a group of us in his office in Gotenburg where he was then head of design for Volvo.

Why is safety such a dominant factor?

The answer lies in a national obsession with the sanctity of human life and a genuine desire to make a difference that goes to the very heart of the legal system. Scientists, engineers and reconstructionists are not only permitted to visit the scene of crashes and conduct thorough investigations, they are encouraged to do so and protected under federal law from being forced to testify to their findings in court.

Both car companies have on staff dozens of PhDs, engineers and scientists with a specific role of rushing to the scene of a crash and conducting a thorough analysis. They can often be on site within an hour of the crash, gathering information while the scene is still fresh. The police and medical personnel are also involved, protecting the scene until they arrive and they have complete access to the medical records of the occupants.

Knowledge gathered from the crash scene and medical records is applied directly to everything from crash test procedures to the dummies used in testing. It is used in programming virtual tests and in designing vehicle components -- often without any requirement to do so.

"Any vehicle manufacturer who wants to be taken seriously must consider safety research and development in real world conditions -- not just mandated test standards," Horbury says.

This attitude has allowed Volvo and Saab to take a leadership position. Rather than merely design to specific standards or tests, they are continually out in front -- either helping set them or ensuring protection for occupants in areas legislators have not even considered.

The human body, despite continual evolution, has not changed significantly in quite some time. The traffic environment certainly has. With the unique ability to conduct thorough on-scene investigations, researchers can determine how specific vehicles and systems perform, including areas not covered by mandated tests. For example, whiplash is not included in any government tests, yet it is one of the most common and costly results of a crash.

There are no standards that address this issue, no requirements for manufacturers to provide protection beyond a head restraint. Volvo and Saab researchers found it to be a major issue in crashes. They discovered head restraints weren't the cure. Both have designed seats and systems to address the issue. They were put into production a few years ago and subsequent analysis of crashes involving these seats are showing a significant real-world reduction in this type of injury.

Seat belts, now an integral part of the safety system of every passenger vehicle on the market, came about under similar circumstances. Volvo introduced the three-point belt in 1959, as the result of knowledge and concern, not legislation.

What's next?

Roads and vehicles are vastly improved. What's needed now in order to reduce death and long-term injury, is more information from the crash scene. If response teams arrived with more knowledge about the event and the occupants, precious time would be saved, allowing them to provide relevant treatment to those most in need.

Crash analysis in Sweden indicates the most common cause of death to be damage from bilateral fractures of the femur, head injuries, pelvic injuries and internal bleeding from chest, abdomen and pelvic injuries.

Some of the GPS and telematics systems installed on many of today's vehicles automatically generate a report containing time and location to a call centre upon airbag deployment.

It is not a huge stretch to the point where that report includes the size and position of the occupants both before and after the event and whether they were wearing belts. Heart rate sensors could detect and report information. Armed with these facts, rescue teams dispatched to the scene would be better prepared. They may even be informed of the crash type -- frontal or side impact, hit from rear or rollover, severity of velocity change -- how hard was the crash and the final vehicle orientation.

Not only would the rescue crews be better informed, expensive duplication of effort could be avoided -- two or more units responding to a single-vehicle, single-occupant crash. Officials could be informed as to whether traffic had to be diverted to avoid further crashes and problems.

In Sweden such co-operation and effort is highly likely. In other jurisdictions it might be more difficult.