AUBURN HILLS, MI – Stopping, starting, and accelerating your car or SUV can burn unnecessary amounts of fuel while driving. To combat this challenge, two new technologies have recently come out to provide a greener driving experience. Nissan’s Eco Pedal pushes back on a driver’s lead foot, while Audi’s Travolution tells a driver how fast to go to make the next green light, according to www.livescience.com.

And Volvo Cars has attracted considerable attention with its new safety function in which the car brakes automatically — Volvo City Safety. City Safety, which is fitted as standard in the Volvo XC60, is a system where at low speeds (0-30 km/h) the car automatically brakes if the driver has been distracted and does not respond to a vehicle in front. The function helps cut the number and severity of low-speed rear-end collisions. Such impacts represent a large proportion of the total number of accidents that take place.

Safety institutes and authorities such as Thatcham (Great Britain) and IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the USA), organize seminars for insurance companies the world over. The reason is that City Safety is expected to reduce the number of personal injuries and material damage in conjunction with low-speed impacts. Costs thus also decrease for customers, insurance companies and society in general. What is more, City Safety helps avoid or reduce the risk of whiplash injuries among occupants in the car being hit.

The new XC60 is Volvo’s safest car ever and it can be equipped with all the very latest advances in safety-enhancing technology. Owing to the positive effects of City Safety, several insurance companies the world over are cutting premiums by 10 to 30 percent for customers who insure the new cross-over model with them.

The longer-term vision of Volvo Cars is to create cars that do not collide, and in the shorter term the aim is that by 2020, nobody should be killed or injured in a Volvo.