by Douglas Bell
Forbes Magazine
Volvo proudly proclaims that: “few people have saved as many lives as Nils Bohlin.” And they are right.
Nils Bohlin is the little-known Volvo engineer who invented the V-type three-point safety belt in 1959, and saw his innovation through to universal adoption across the motor industry. His new cross-strap design made seat belts much easier to use, and much safer too. It is hard now to imagine cars without them.
Bohlin’s breakthrough idea came 64 years ago. The Swedish company Volvo carved out a space in the competitive car industry by making driver and passenger safety a core part of its brand at a time when this was an afterthought for many car makers.
Volvo’s president at the time was Gunnar Engellau, an engineer himself, who had suffered direct personal loss from a road traffic accident. A relative had died, partly because of shortcomings in the two-point belt design—which was not even standard feature in cars at the time. This personal tragedy encouraged Engellau to find a better solution, poaching Nils Bohlin from rival firm Saab, and setting about this problem as a matter of urgency. Volvo would invent a better solution, and be the first car maker to standardize it.
Invention Versus Innovation
There were two major problems with the historic two-point belt design, which crosses the lap only. First, the human pelvis is hinged. A single strap doesn’t restrain the torso, leaving passengers vulnerable to severe head, chest and spinal injuries in a collision. Positioned badly, the belt can crush your internal organs on impact. They don’t work very well. Second, people don’t want to wear them. Until Bohlin’s commission, mid-century seat belts were clumsy and uncomfortable. If you can’t persuade people to wear a restraint, it turns out that they are useless.
Much credit to Bohlin for making seat belts much more comfortable then, and much easier to use. You could now buckle-up across the chest and waist, using just one hand. This seems simple enough. But even with the new design improvements, it took six years of promotion to persuade a minority of Swedes to use the new design.
Innovations like this can require many millions of dollars in research and development and marketing investment. Volvo went to great lengths to test the efficacy of this invention in the 1950s and 1960s, running hundreds of experiments, and researching tens of thousands of accidents to verify the efficacy. But giving people scientific data is not enough to persuade them to make a change in their lives. Mass adoption very often requires an emotional (or cultural) paradigm shift.
Seat belt usage in Sweden did eventually grow; from an astonishingly-low 25 percent in 1965, to more than 90 percent by 1975. This reminds us that invention and innovation are not the same thing; the latter requires adoption to qualify, making innovation invariably risky. Without Volvo’s persistent leadership, modern seat belts may have taken an extra ten years, or more, to come to market.
Capitalism With A Conscience—Volvo’s Great Act of Generosity
Volvo patented the designs; standard industrial practice, to protect their investment from copy-cats. Good patents offer you a defensible advantage over rivals—twenty years of monopoly rights in the U.S., for example. Having claimed this prize, Volvo was in a position to charge significant license fees to rivals, or indeed, to promote their cars as the safest on the road, by retaining exclusivity.
Remarkably, Volvo did neither, but made Bohlin’s patent immediately available to all. Having sponsored the R&D, they gifted their designs to competitors, to encourage mass adoption and to save lives.
Quantifying Success
The three-point safety belt has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It has prevented or reduced the severity of injuries for millions of people. Billions of people have used one over the last year alone. This surely makes his three-point safety belt among the most important innovations in the automobile’s 130-year history.
If you are not wearing a seat belt, good luck. A scientific study by Bohlin, published in 1967, covered 28,000 road traffic accidents, demonstrating that unbelted occupants sustained fatal injuries throughout the whole speed scale. Amazingly, of the 37,511 people involved in those accidents, no passengers wearing a 3-point seatbelt had died, unless traveling at very high speeds—above 60 mph.
Consider the savings at scale to the insurance industry from this. Tens of billions of insurance losses have been avoided since 1959, from the millions of mitigated injuries and deaths avoided. In turn, this has saved us all on insurance premiums, as car safety has been so dramatically improved.
What about the value of Volvo’s gift to the automobile industry? To understand this, we have to assume a reasonable fee for licensing. For simplicity, and for fun, let’s assume a $10 fee for every car made in 1978—the penultimate year of Volvo’s patent, and its father-figure’s final year in charge.
By 1978, Gunnar Engellau who commissioned this design, had grown Volvo revenues to a record $1 billion. Things were going well. Industry output was at peak too, producing well over 40 million vehicles in the year. Applying a retrospective and hypothetical $10 royalty against 40 million cars could net $400 million in royalties for Volvo. It may well have generated super-normal profits for the company. Or it may have flopped. What we do know for certain, however, is that the company valued passenger safety over potential profits.
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