9/4: Dumb car owner

[Slithy_Tove]

Originally posted by Mas71
If noone has died in a 240 Volvo between those years I would assume that they mean worldwide.
The situation with safety aware people driving Volvo may be the case in the US but in the homecountry of Volvo, Sweden, the car is a lot more common and many (if not most) teenagers choose Volvo as their first car.

This is kind of interesting. I've been trying for the last hour to run down an authoritative source for that 'no deaths between 1988 and 1993' number on the web, and I haven't been able to do so. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety keeps fatality figures by car, but I can only find current numbers on their website for the 850, which show that it has a total fatality rate per million registered vehicle years of 39, comparable to the Toyota Camry, the Buick Riviera, and worse than vans such as the Nissan Quest and the Dodge Caravan.

The chatter on alt.autos.volvo is that the 240 was safer than Volvos that have been built since.

Unfortunately, the US Department of Transportation's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database only goes back to 1994. But in that year, it shows 82 fatalities for the 240, and that's only for the US, of course. For 1995 there were 99 deaths, for 1996 there were 94 deaths, and so forth. I'm highly skeptical that deaths per year could be zero for five years, then suddenly jump to 80-100 a year.

I really think this is an urban legend. I saw it repeated on Usenet, too, without attribution.

Still, Volvos seem to be fairly safe cars. The IIHS data did apparently show that in the mid 90's, the 240 had, compared the average car in the US, a tenth the fatality rate per 10,000 vehicles registered. I'm pretty happy with my little Saturn, but I've started thinking about a Volvo for my next car. There's definitely a Volvo cult out there. People seem to hang on to them forever.