Why Volvo Gave Away The Use Of Their Most Valuable Invention

Within a year as Chief Safety Engineer at Volvo, Nils Bohlin invented the three-point safety belt, a safety device that restrains the human body safely in extreme accidents. According to Bohlin’s New York Times obituary, he developed the modern seatbelt using knowledge gained from ejector seats. “I realized both the upper and lower body must be held securely with one strap across the chest and one across the hips,” said Bohlin. But the biggest challenge was to make it simple to use and operable with one hand, and Bohlin did it with aplomb.

Bohlin applied for and received a patent for the three-point safety belt in 1958. The first car to have a standard three-point safety belt was the Volvo PV544 which debuted in 1959, but the safety feature was initially met with skepticism. Volvo conducted a series of tests and trial impacts from the late 1950s to the 1960s to verify the benefits of its three-point seat belt, and the results were staggering. According to studies conducted by Bohlin in 1967 covering 28,000 road accidents, there were zero fatalities in the 37,511 people involved in those accidents who were all wearing three-point safety belts.