Back to high school with Volvo Safety Driving Experience

Parents, be honest, have you ever ever struggled together with your child’s homework? I don’t have kids, but I’m pretty confident. Confident that I’ll pull out all the remaining hair on my head in case you give me a sheet of highschool maths. It shouldn’t be that way, right? We all know what it’s, we’ve studied it before, and a few may need even scored As in the topic back within the day.

Friends, it’s all about practice. Similar to in sports, you possibly can’t just show up after a few years away and curl one into the highest corner or hit a one-handed backhand winner such as you never left.

It’s the identical with driving. While we drive on a regular basis, it’s rarely that we get right into a situation that’s near the automotive’s (and our own) limits. Many drivers haven’t even been in such situations before – we’re taking a couple of automotive’s maximum braking power and the sting of traction. It has been a few years since I participated in a driving course and pushed a automotive to its limits in a protected, controlled environment, so back to high school it was.

Last month, Volvo Automotive Malaysia (VCM) hosted its first-ever Safety Driving Experience to cap its ‘For Life’ campaign at KL’s Sungai Besi airfield. The campaign highlights the a long time of safety innovations by the Swedish carmaker, which have probably saved thousands and thousands of lives.

Notable firsts include the three-point safety belt (1959), the rearward-facing child seat (1972), booster cushion for youths (1978), side-impact airbags (1994), side curtain airbags (1998), blind spot information system (BLIS, 2003) and pedestrian detection with full auto-brake (2010), amongst other safety features which can be now ubiquitous in cars.

Almost as clever is the long-lasting Volvo For Life tagline – I can’t consider many instances where just two words in a slogan can say a lot a couple of brand.

“The Volvo Safety Driving Experience perfectly sums up the ethos of our ‘For Life’ campaign – Once you feel protected, you possibly can truly be free,” said Patricia Yaw, head of promoting and PR at VCM. “We wish to empower Volvo drivers with the correct mindset and knowledge for safety on the road, learning life-saving skills with confidence in the newest Volvo cars equipped with cutting-edge advanced driver assistance systems and safety innovations acting as a further safety net,” she added.

The 2-day event saw 240 (only a coincidence, I’m sure) participants consisting of Volvo customers, enthusiasts and the media learning essential defensive driving skills, and putting the teachings into practice. Kudos to VCM for being so generous – 102 of the participants were non-Volvo owners, and so they only needed to pay RM100 for the experience.

The day began off early with an IKEA breakfast (a novel pairing of two iconic Swedish brands) before a briefing on the fundamentals. Seating accurately is the inspiration of driving well – whether from a performance or safety standpoint – yet, most individuals don’t do that accurately. An excessive amount of recline and limbs fully stretched out is probably the most common mistake.

If you happen to’re not seated right (elbows and knees bent, hands on the wheel’s 3 and 9 position) you’ll have limited steering range and won’t have the option to step hard enough in emergency braking, setting yourself up for failure for ALL the exercises, which simulate actual critical situations.

The security driving module then proceeded to introduce participants to ABS braking and emergency lane change within the XC40 and C40 Recharge Pure Electric EVs. Almost everyone has heard of ABS and stability control, and we would like these safety features in our cars, but not everyone knows how ABS works, what happens when it really works, and the way we must always react along with it.

The exercise had us stand on the brakes (literally, else anti-lock won’t engage) from 60 km/h to a full stop, to familiarise participants with the protection feature, before upping the sport to involve avoiding an obstacle. In real life, this could possibly be a dog or a toddler, so knowing what to do is significant.

From hard braking to no braking for the following exercise – emergency lane change. Once more, we accelerated to around 60 km/h (feels faster than you’re thinking that in a narrow lane of cones) before swerving into one other lane without touching the brakes, and straightening after that. The instructors gave the left or right command on the very last moment in the ultimate run, testing our reflexes.

Not every real-life emergency situation allows us the time and space to brake, and this exercise showed us how we must always react, and the way the automotive will react, in split second scenarios.

With the basics covered, the programme shifted to the runway for the ‘experiential’ module, where we got to check out chosen driver assist features which can be relevant in every day driving, comparable to Pilot Assist (adaptive cruise control with steering, stop and go) and cross traffic alert with auto brake. These features are your pals, get to know your pals.

We’re on an airstrip, one of the best place for a top speed test, but this can be a safety event, I sighed. To my surprise, we got top speed runs on the 1.8 km-runway, where I managed to hit the XC60 PHEV‘s 180 km/h speed cap.

If you happen to don’t already know, all recent Volvo cars since 2020 are limited to 180 km/h ‘to send strong signal in regards to the dangers of speeding’. That’s still good enough speed on tap, and plenty of would have left the event with an indelible memory of hitting top speed on a city airstrip, with the KL skyline in full view and the double-deck SPE highway alongside.

But one of the best was yet to return, for me no less than. The event ended with a timed slalom course that needed greater than competitive juices. This was the time for participants to place into practice all that they’ve learned about automotive control on the limit, and piece all of them together right into a smooth lap.

The important thing word is smooth – it’s hard to attain the fragile balance between getting into hard (you’ll run wide and/or ESC will cut power, losing you precious seconds) and being too cautious (five-second penalty for hitting a cone might weigh heavily for some, but too protected = too slow), but that’s what separates the nice from the remaining, and one of the best from the nice. You’ve got to push the automotive to the sting, but not let it fall off the imaginary cliff – it’s a advantageous line.

A line that this participant managed to walk on reasonably well, only to trip and fall at the ultimate hurdle, which is to stop the automotive fully inside a box after full power on the ultimate straight. I overshot, and the next five-second penalty turned a rating that was title contender into mid-table. Never mind the prize, it was great fun.

But greater than fun, the Volvo Safety Driving Experience was a timely refresher course for this driver, one which reactivated the muscle memory of how you can react in critical situations, along with a automotive’s safety features. I’m pretty certain that lots of my fellow participants were recent to such scenarios, and what they learned and experienced that day at Sungai Besi air base would keep on with them. For Life.

GALLERY: Volvo Safety Driving Experience