Among Volvo employees and enthusiasts, you are likely to hear a few words that at first sound unlikely. “There’s a little bit of Volvo in every vehicle on the American road!” You know what? That statement is true! For the 1959 model year, Volvo made the three-point seatbelt standard equipment on all its cars. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nils Bohlin developed the three-point seatbelt in 1958, the year he joined Volvo to lead its safety development program. Bohlin was already a well-known and accomplished designer, engineer and clever inventor. As an engineer for Saab, he invented the ejection seat for an airplane that had the engine and propeller behind the cockpit. Today, just about every military pilot sits in a descendent of that innovative safety device.

When Volvo decided to make automobile safety a key part of its mission, it reached out to Nils Bohlin and, within months of signing him on, adopted the seatbelt, a safety feature still considered to be the most important such component in your car. In fact, according to United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, safety belts save 4,000 lives and prevent more than 100,000 injuries each year.

Nils Bohlin seatbelt invention caught the eye of the then president of Volvo. Since he had just lost a family member due to a car crash, the president brought Bohlin into Volvo to continue his work.

Around this time, the only seatbelts were lap belts. They were often worn by racecar drivers. For ordinary passenger cars, the lap belt was an option.

In his work at Volvo, Bohlin designed the three-point safety belt. In 1959, that belt became standard equipment on all Volvos in Sweden.

Research from Britain showed that the three-point seatbelt could cut the risk of death and serious injury by 60 percent.

Volvo was so enthusiastic about the prospects for safety belts that they sent Bohlin to America for demonstrations of his invention. In an act of selfless generosity, Bohlin assigned the rights to his invention, U.S. Patent Number 3,043,625, to the Consumer Product Safety Commission with the hope that all U.S. cars would soon use the device.

It would be almost 20 years until the safety attributes of seatbelts were legally recognized in the United States. In 1985, New York and Texas were the first states to mandate the use of safety belts. Today, safety belts are a requirement in all states.

The safety belt was not the last of Bohlin’s innovations for Volvo. He invented the stepless adjustable lumbar support for the 1964 Volvo 122. He led Volvo’s study of side-impact injury prevention that yielded new chassis engineering in the form of construction that allowed the controlled distribution of impact forces and later in the development of side impact airbags. Bohlin retired from Volvo in 1985.

Bohlin received many honors for his work in safety engineering. The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences awarded him its gold medal in 1995. In 1999, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. Nils Bohlin died of a heart attack at age 82 in 2002.

Airbags are important and require no action on the part of car occupants, but safety belts keep you in the car during an accident and are still the most effective form of automotive safety.  

Today, Volvo continues to employ the best and the brightest engineers, scientists and designers to ensure its vehicles provide the utmost in protection for the occupants.