Volvo crashes the XC90 into a ditch

We went to Sweden to watch a car crash. Not on the off-chance of a motorway pile-up - we could've hung around the M25 for one of those - but rather for an organised smash involving a new Volvo XC90 and a family of dummies.

The idea was to show what could happen should you run off the road and begin an impromptu inspection of the surrounding countryside, and how Volvo is determined that you'll live to report your findings. Here's what we learned.

A satsuma-coloured XC90 filled with a family of crash-test dummies is fired along a sled and out of a long tubular building, like a bright orange cannonball.

As it emerges into the scenery at 50mph it veers into a ditch, as if the driver has fallen asleep and drifted off the motorway. It scrapes and crunches along the gravel and hits a foot-high mound, which launches it into the air with a violent whump. There's a brief and eerie silence as it takes flight, almost dragging its bottom along the ground, before landing with another heavy blow and crunching into a tall mud bank.

In about three seconds it's gone from being a shiny SUV cruising sleekly along the road, to a crippled, sickening wreck. From the steaming mess come faint chimes from the car's emergency systems. If the dummies were humans, you could add a baby's cry to that. It's enough to make you drive in a saintly manner for the rest of your life, and every fast-lane bully should be forced to watch an event like this.

Despite the ferocity of the crash, the car has fared reasonably well. The brunt of the blow was taken by the undercarriage, which has left a trail of shavings. The alloys have shattered and been pushed upwards. But the grille is intact and the bonnet hasn't crumpled.

In fact, the thin gaps where doors and other open-able things meet bodywork are just as they were before the crash (apart from a cracked rear bumper). For this, thank the latticework of various exotic steels and aluminium that make up its skeleton.

As for the dummies, we can assume they're probably alive and kicking due to a roster of safety stuff. Stuff such as seatbelt tensioners: they detect an impact a split-second before it occurs, and pull tightly across your chest with a force of 300Nm to straighten your spine and stop you from being tossed around (we tried a 170Nm demo, which is enough to take your breath away). And there are enough airbags to make a bouncy castle.

"By 2020, no-one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo". That's the message plastered all over the big screens at the post-crash presentation.

Of course, it's more of a vision than a statement of fact - you can't mitigate against the most freakish of accidents, nor idiotic human behaviour. But as mission statements go, it's certainly ambitious, and rather commendable.

"Is safety sexy?" asks Peter Mertens, head of R&D at Volvo. "We think it's a very sexy topic! But it's about more than sheet metal and crash shells", he says.

It's why the company goes beyond the standard, box-ticky tests needed to put a car on sale. Way beyond. It even has a database of every crash involving a Volvo in Sweden, with specific details of what happened - even the shape of the verges and precise nature of any injuries - and how the car might have done better. Yes, car companies take safety seriously. They have to.

But Volvo has placed it above all else. In a world where carmakers try to convince us that even the most turgid saloon is a secret racing car, this is extremely refreshing. Exciting? No. Worthwhile? That depends on how much you enjoy being alive.

Before the crash test we were taken to a brand-new test facility called AstaZero, in a pine-scented Swedish forest. Like most test centres it has whole hectares of empty tarmac and replica roads on which cars can be honed and abused. But unlike other places it's not for performance testing or doing big skids.

Instead, it's designed specifically for companies such as Volvo to develop active safety tech such as emergency-auto-brakes, blind-spot warning systems and things that stop you clipping cyclists and pedestrians and other road-based obstacles. In other words, all the stuff that should prevent accidents from occurring in the first place.

Infrared lasers, radars, road-reading cameras - they can all be trained to recognise this stuff, in a controlled but realistic environment. There's a fake motorway, a rural road and even a mock town, wallpapered to resemble Harlem, where car companies can simulate real-life situations with moving props, including a pop-out moose (a common obstruction in the slums of New York City).

While some companies bet their R&D budgets on fully autonomous cars, Volvo is concentrating on a more realistic future, where cars will merely step in once the human brain has failed to act, where even the most potent stab of the brakes would result in a rear-ender.

"We don't want to see people sending emails from behind the wheel", says Mertens. "Autonomous cars within two years? I think that's bull***t. It's not about sending emails while driving. It's about avoiding accidents and having less fatalities".

Will the company achieve its ‘no fatalities' goal? After all, 2020 is only five years away and let's face it, car tech is developing faster than human evolution. No matter how much safety stuff we're surrounded by, we'll still need the odd miracle if road deaths are to be wiped out. Not to mention the fact we'll all have to buy Volvos and wear brown trousers.