GOTEBORG, Sweden: Over the years, I have watched a particular safety expert at Volvo give many informed and comprehensive presentations about a subject that's very close to his company's heart -- safety.
Indeed, this gentleman is one of the three most enlightening safety experts I have ever encountered. So I listened closely when he explained what was going to happen when the company's impressive safety centre geared up to make an XC 90 sport-utility wagon roll over for the amusement and edification of myself and a group of my colleagues.
We were kept a good distance from the projected path of the XC 90, the safety expert said, because you never know exactly what's going to happen in such a circumstance, even though the Volvo Safety Centre had already rolled various other incarnations of the vehicle about 15 times. ''All we know for sure is that it's going to roll over two or maybe three times,'' he said on a couple of occasions.
When the big moment came and the seven-seat, four-door SUV was pushed out of a tunnel at more than 40 km/h, it rolled one, two, three, four-and-a-half times and came to rest on the passenger side.
So, what are we to learn by the fact that the only thing Volvo's chief safety knew for sure about what was going to happen didn't happen, that the vehicle rolled more than it was supposed to?
Not that Volvo needs to get itself a new safety spokesman who can make better predictions about something like that because this gentleman is widely and correctly understood to be a subject expert, but that we need to get a more realistic view of vehicle safety.
We need to remember that foretelling the fate of people inside moving vehicles when they t-bone into each other, barrel roll across a median, clip a telephone pole, or do a long jump over a trench into a line of trees is an inexact science, at best.