Nobody has ever died in an XC90
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43752226

'The most significant development since the safety belt'

Quote; ''Here is an extraordinary statistic: since the Volvo XC90 went on sale in the UK in 2002 it has sold over 50,000 vehicles, yet not a single person has been killed while driving it, or as a passenger.

It is, according to the independent laboratory Thatcham Research, the safest car it has ever tested.''

That story would be more convincing if Volvo also released their methodology as to how they gathered all the crash statistics from around the UK to see if an XC90 was involved.

In Scotland the police use a paper form to fill out crashes and to search through them to see if an XC90 had been in a fatal road accident, would be a large enough considering there were the following road accident fatalities 2013 -202, 2014 - 200, 2015 -75, 2016 -106.

Now do the same all over the UK with the numerous different ways of recording fatal road accidents.

Do Volvo also gather such statistics for other cars in the range? If so, lets see them. If not, why only gather them for one car?

I don't know about the UK claim but the American study was carried out by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and has nothing to do with Volvo statistics but IIHS records include only driver deaths because the presence of passengers is unknown. The institute has published death rates by make and model periodically since 1989, at first for cars only and later for all passenger vehicles.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/nat...ears/22521103/

Quote ''As traffic deaths continue to decline, nine vehicles (one of which is the XC90) were found to have had no fatalities for model years 2009 through 2012, while three were found to have been involved in more than 100 deaths per 1 million registered vehicles, according to a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety''

Maybe Volvo get their data from the insurance companies, after they have collated the data they get from the police.

I am just wondering how do Volvo really know and is the claim accurate?

I don't think these are Volvo statistics, pretty sure they are Government statistics:

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/cb7ae6f0...ad-safety-data

The US study states;

"Of the nine safest models, six were SUVs -- Kia Sorento, Lexus RX 350, Mercedes-Benz GL, Toyota Highlander and Sequoia and Volvo XC90. The other fatality-free models over the four model years were the Audi A4 four-wheel-drive, Honda Odyssey minivan and Subaru Legacy sedan."

Bit of a mixed bag that suggests luck and who buys a specific type of vehicle may have as much to do with a lack of fatalities, than the safety aids the manufacturer built in. The study itself said;

"Improved vehicle designs and safety technology have a lot to do with the reduced risk, the institute said. But a weak economy that led to reductions in driving may also have played a role, it said."

Having seen myself volvos own crash investigation people out in Sweden attending a road accident I’m sure Volvo have a pretty good idea if anyone has ever died in the xc90.

For which there are lots of gaps with "NULL" or "missing" when it comes to make an model. If Volvo have used that, then the claim is unproven as the data is incomplete.

How? I was in the police. We recorded make and model on a road accident form 4.4.2 and the space for make and model was tiny, you could barely fit "Volvo" into the space for make! We did not inform car makers one of their cars had been in a fatal accident.

The insurance companies may keep better data that can be searched. But there are lots of insurance companies, so does Volvo pay them to keep a trace on their records and report back?

The government records are incomplete, as shown above, so that is not the source.

Most of the above posts seem to be 'discussing' how the statistics were determined.

Well, I think we all know that if you have one hand in boiling water and the other in freezing water that you are, statistically, comfortable.

Statistics (or as we called them on one course I was on: 'sadistics') one can prove/disprove anything. But I don't think that we can detract the fact that the xc90 is probably a very safe car to be in in the event of some sort of collision.