Parents, let’s be honest, have you ever had trouble with your child’s homework? I don’t have children yet but I’m quite confident. Confident that I would pull out every last hair on my head if you gave me a high school math worksheet. It shouldn’t be like that, right? We know what it is, we’ve studied it before, and some may have even gotten an A in the subject back in the day.
Guys, it’s all about practice. Just like in sports, you can’t show up after years away and hit a shot into the top corner or hit a backhand winner with one hand as if you’d never left.
The same goes for driving. Even though we drive every day, it’s not uncommon to find ourselves in situations where we’re close to our car’s (and our own) limits. Many drivers have never even encountered such situations before – we are considering the maximum braking force and the limits of the car’s traction. It’s been years since I’ve taken a driving course and pushed a car to its limits in a safe, controlled environment, so it’s the same when it comes to school.
Last month, Volvo Car Malaysia (VCM) held its first Safe Driving Experience to showcase its ‘For Life’ campaign at KL’s Sungai Besi airport. The campaign highlights the Swedish automaker’s decades of safety innovations, which have probably saved millions of lives.
Notable firsts include three-point seat belts (1959), rear-facing child seats (1972), child booster cushions (1978), side-impact airbags (1994), side curtain airbags (1998), blind spot information systems (BLIS, 2003), and pedestrian detection with fully automatic braking (2010), among other safety features now common in cars.
Almost equally clever is the iconic Volvo For Life slogan – I can’t think of many instances where just two words in a slogan can say a lot about a brand.
“The Volvo Safe Driving Experience perfectly sums up the ethos of our ‘For Life’ campaign – When you feel safe, you can be truly free.” “We want to equip Volvo drivers with the right mindset and knowledge about road safety, confidently learning life-saving skills on the latest Volvo cars equipped with driver assistance systems Advanced technology and safety improvements serve as an additional safety net, she added.
This two-day event saw 240 participants (I’m sure just a coincidence), including Volvo customers, enthusiasts and media learning the skills Drive the necessary defensive driving and apply the lessons in practice. Thank you VCM for being so generous – 102 participants were non-Volvo owners and they only paid RM100 for the experience.
The day starts early with an IKEA breakfast (a novel combination of two iconic Swedish brands) before a recap of the basics. Sitting properly is the foundation of good driving – whether from a performance or safety standpoint – yet most people don’t do it properly. Leaning too much and stretching your limbs completely is the most common mistake.
If you sit incorrectly (elbows and knees bent, hands on the steering wheel in positions 3 and 9), you will have limited driving range and will not be able to step hard enough when braking in an emergency. , putting yourself at risk of failure in ALL situations. Exercises simulate important real-life situations.
The safe driving module then proceeds to introduce participants to ABS brakes and emergency lane changes on the road. XC40 And C40 Pure electricity recharge Tram. Most people have heard of ABS and stability control systems, and we all want these safety features in our cars, but not everyone knows how ABS works, what it does, and what it does. what happens when it is active and how we should react when combined with it.
The exercise required us to apply the brakes (literally, otherwise the anti-lock system would not work) from a speed of 60 km/h to a complete stop, so that participants could get used to the safety features first. at the beginning of the game involves avoiding obstacles. In real life, this could be a dog or a child, so knowing what to do is important.
From braking hard to not braking for the next exercise – emergency lane changes. Once again, we accelerated to around 60km/h (which feels faster than you’d think in a narrow cone lane) before switching to another lane without touching the brakes and going straight after that. The instructor gave orders left or right at the last moment of the last 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 should react and how the car should react in split-second situations.
With the fundamentals covered, the show moved onto the runway for the ‘experience’ module, where we got to try out selected driver assistance features relevant to driving every day, such as Pilot Assist (adaptive cruise control with steering, stop and go) and cross-traffic alert with automatic braking. These features are your friends, get to know your friends.
We’re on the runway, the best place to test top speed, but this is a safe event, I sighed. To my surprise, we were given full speed on the 1.8km long runway, where I achieved my goal. XC60PHEVSpeed limit 180 km/h.
If you don’t know, all new Volvo cars from 2020 have a speed limit of 180 km/h “to send a strong signal about the dangers of speeding”. That speed is still more than enough and many will leave the event with the indelible memory of hitting top speed on the city’s tarmac, with panoramic views of KL’s skyline and the SPE two expressway. floors along.
But the best is yet to come, at least for me. The event ends with a timed slalom race that requires more than competitive juice. It’s time for participants to apply everything they’ve learned about driving a car at the limit and put it all together into a smooth lap.
The key word is smooth – it’s not easy to strike a delicate balance between going hard (you’ll run wide and/or the ESC will cut power, costing you precious seconds) and being too cautious (penalizing five seconds because hitting the cone may be heavy for some, but too safe = too slow), but that’s what separates the good from the rest and the best from the good. You have to push the car to the edge but not let it fall off the imaginary cliff – it’s a delicate line.
One section of the road this participant went quite well, only tripping and falling at the last obstacle, which was stopping the bike completely in the box after using all his strength on the last straight. I shot too quickly, and a penalty five seconds later turned what had been a championship-winning scoreline into mid-table. Don’t mind the prize, it’s fun.
But more than fun, the Volvo Safe Driving Experience is a timely refresher course for this driver, one that helps reactivate muscle memory on how to react in critical situations, Combined with car safety features. I am quite certain that many of my fellow participants were unfamiliar with such situations, and what they learned and experienced that day at Sungai Besi Air Base will stay with them. For life.
COLLECTION: Volvo’s safe driving experience
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