Automakers, parts suppliers, governments, and global agencies like the United Nations have all been looking at ways to reduce the 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes every year. But Reuters reports that Volvo, the Swedish car manufacturer currently owned by Ford, is the first to set an actual target date to eliminate death and injury in its cars—which some analysts see as a bid for Volvo to hold onto its lead in consumer perception of safety.

"I think if you look into the future, we as a community will not accept that we have injuries," said Jan Ivarsson, leader of the Volvo safety team with specialists in everything from biomechanics to engineering to behavioral science, in the report. To this end, Volvo is taking a page from the aviation industry and studying how to create a matrix of systems that interact to begin crash prevention and mitigation hours, instead of seconds, before impact.

Some of this technology is already floating around in Volvo's parts bin, such as crash avoidance systems, ignitions that don't work if the driver is intoxicated, alertness sensors that wake up sleepy drivers, and GPS systems that actually prevent drivers from speeding to their destinations.

But the automaker now wants to go further. "Radar, sonar and other sensors will extend its so-called deformation zone until it becomes, in essence, a huge electronic bumper reaching out on all sides to gather information to feed back to the vehicle," the report said. "In a crash situation, where many drivers freeze, the car will be able to take over and steer or brake on its own. Reducing pre-impact speed by 15 km an hour would halve the road-death rate, according to Tingvall, so self-braking is key."