In Scandinavia dummies don’t drive cars.

Saab cars are developed where other manufacturers come to test their cars. Up here in Scandinavia, a demanding climate and icy roads offer excellent settings for tough tests. For us, these are perfectly normal conditions. It’s what our safety engineers experience on their way to work. No wonder the very design of a Saab is shaped around crash avoidance. Power at hand for safer overtaking, a responsive chassis with predictable behaviour, advanced electronic systems for increased stability and powerful and reliable brakes, to mention a few features.

But in the event of a collision a Saab is also designed to help protect you and your passengers. This real-life safety philosophy has proven to give very tangible results. The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) in the USA compares cars on the basis of the number of injuries sustained following on-road crashes. HLDI gives the Saab 9-3 Sport Sedan, the Saab 9-5 Sedan and the Saab 9-5 SportCombi top ratings for fewer injury claims, with the best-possible assessment of “substantially better than average”. Furthermore, in a bi-annual survey of injury claims carried out by the leading Swedish Insurance Company Folksam, the Saab 9-5 was declared “the Safest Car in Sweden” in both 2003 and 2005. And that after having studied more than 94,000 car-to-car road accidents.

Learning from real life goes back to our roots as an aircraft manufacturer. In the aviation industry it’s routine practice to investigate accidents. So it was only natural for our car safety engineers to do likewise. Today our own experts regularly carry out on-the-spot investigations. Looking for answers to questions like what happened before, during and after the collision, how the car was deformed, what injuries the occupants may have suffered and how the injuries occurred. Interviews with the people involved in the accident, images from the work carried out by the emergency rescue services and studies of police reports are vital sources of information in this ongoing process. In addition, medical experts specialising in trauma and orthopaedics assist in injury analysis. All this information is then fed into our Crash Analysis System (CAST) – an important tool that helps us gain a unique insight into how we can further enhance the safety of our cars. Every single day.