Volvo Life Paint comes under fire while freebies fly off the shelves

I though superfluous litigation was strictly an American affliction. I do apologize, but if a product has the potential to prevent my untimely demise and keep me around longer so I can raise my son, those insistent on promoting their niche agendas can go pound sand. This nit picking tomfoolery impedes usefull progress while promoting disharmony, acrimony and mistrust. If dude needed a kidney, bet ya fifty bucks he wouldn't say no to the president of Volo if he was the only match. Such silliness. Find a hobby.

I can understand the negative feeling towards Volvo on this; regardless of the product's merits it does seem like a somewhat disingenuous marketing campaign.

Imagine an arms manufacturer handing out free bullet-proof vests in a warzone. No doubt the vests have some usefulness but making fewer guns or being more selective in how they are sold would be much more helpful.

If Volvo really wanted to improve road safety they would be calling for measures to bring about modal shift away from the motor car and to provide safe infrastructure design for alternative modes. This is obviously not going to be good for business so we see things like this that will not negatively impact their business but have very debatable real-world benefits.

So far as i can see the halfwits we're reporting the views of are:

1) Mikael Colville-Andersen, CEO of Copenhagenize Design Co.

2) Jamie Osman, shop manager at Peloton & Co in Spitalfields, East London, the people giving the paint away

3) Rosie Downes, Campaign Manager at the London Cycling Campaign

4) CTC Policy Officer, Cherry Allen

5) Nikki Rooke, Head of Corporate Communications, Events and Sponsorship for Volvo Car UK Limited

but i'm sure your opinion is equally valid, so, y'know, thanks for sharing.

There are many first time posters on this topic.

All sharing the positivity for Volvo.

Seems a tad strange.

I'm with muppetteer, Colville-Andersen and some of these cyclists are coming off like a bunch of whiny pricks! How are you going to bitch about something that is at least intended to increase the safety of cyclists?! Is it perfectly effective, are there other things that could be done to promote bike safety? Sure. But what are you all doing?? At least Volvo has spent some time and money doing something! Unlike you all, just trolling and whining. Pathetic! I'd sell my bike if I thought all cyclists were lke you a-holes.

Raising motorist awareness via visual cues is all well and good but the audio aspect is an area where cyclists are letting themselves down. All bikes shoul be fitted with a klaxon that begins to sound as soon as the wheels begin to rotate. In this way motorists will register cyclists early and be able to make a rational decision whether to kill them or not.

"If Life Paint saves the life of just one cyclist it will have proved beneficial."

Well I say - "If car helmets saves the life of just one motorist it will have proved beneficial." So where are Volvo giving away car helmets like they do bike helmets and high vis. paint? Where are Volvo lobbying for reduced speed limits in urban areas or much better training for drivers, or much stricter driving licence requirements & re-testing every 5 years for drivers or Volvo lobbying for safer trucks instead of preventing measures for safer trucks? Stuff off Volvo you hypocrites. I might start to believe their safety hype when they include 5x car helmets with every car they sell and make all their trucks safer for cyclists & pedestrians

High vis., good lights etc. to protect yourself are all good ideas & I've made myself as visible as possible on the roads with reflective tape etc. for over 30 years. But a car company trying to get cyclists to make up for the defects of the people driving their products is pathetic and self serving. I will NEVER buy a Volvo and will continue to bag anyone who does while Volvo carry on with their prejudice against cyclists in the name of "safety". All Volvo really care about is their profit margin and market share. "Safety" is simply their marketing tool.

Ach, there's always some moaning git ready to wheel out an opinion.

Weren't Volvo one of lorry makers who blocked changes to EU rulea that would habe permitted redesigning lorries to make them safer, because it would have cost them money?

Look back at their video and tell me how many of those crashes would have been less likely with reflective paint.

If it was an apply once product, I might be less cynical but seriously, once a week?!

Yup. That is what this daily mail of cycling website has sunk to. Anything to turn what is qjote a positive effort into a negative "everyone is against us" movement. Sad.

Quote:

I doubt it will ever be possible to produce a car that can't kill people, so I'm not sure what you're hoping for

This is exactly what most companies are working on, especially Volvo - a car that will not kill people.

I used to develop the algorithms for one such company. It's complex, and needs a lot of testing and real-world trials, but it will happen.

I completley understand the response of most people here, it is the same gut/instictive/emotional response I had when I read about lifepaint. I am a road safety analyst for a large English local authority, a recent study I produced showed that only around 25% of collisions involving adult cyclists are primarilty the fault of the cyclist, making cyclists the least blame-worthy group on the road. Furthermore the most common contributory factor in Car vs Cyclist collisions is "Fail to look properly".

However when I had time to think more rationally about it I realised KQ makes some very good points.

If I was lying in a hospital bed, having been hit by a driver who didn't see me, I would definitely have preferred it it if the driver had seen me, even if that meant using a product from the company that made the car that hit me.

Cyclists are (quite wrongly) a much maligned road-user group in the UK. Although the lion's share of the blame for cyclist injuries lies with other road users, having a strop about lifepaint simply gives the anti-cycling brigade ammution to paint us (no pun intended) as people refusing to take responsibility for our own safety. I don't want to give them ANY excuse for their hateful ill-informed opinions. I recently read a story about some students in the US who had developed a product allowing people to test if their drink had been spiked, with a view to protecting women against date-rape. What shocked me was the vitriol directed towards them from women's groups - accusations of victim blaming etc. As an "outsider", to me this just looked ungrateful. My thoughts were, rape is terrible, there's no panacea for solving it, so anything that helps prevent it from happening is surely a good thing.

Equally there is no panacea for preventing cyclists from getting injured on the roads (cyclists have been killed in collisions with other cyclists and with street furniture - so not even the eradiction of cars would solve it). Life changing and fatal injuries are a much more serious thing than the politics of road transport. Therefore I don't feel like we have the luxury of not being pragmatic about the situation, and doing whatever we can keep ourselves safe (after all, 4 of the products in the 'Top 20' article on this website are lights). This approach will allow us to retain the moral high ground from which we can hold other road users to account for their actions.

Gotta agree with KQ on this one. If the paint had been developed by a cycle brand would there still be so many complaints/such negativity? I don't think so.

I must be missing something here. This article tried real hard to instead of thanking Volvo for the time, energy, and money they invested into this early research project (which I for one have wished for something like many times when cycling at night), to instead almost blame them for all sorts of unrelated items, and many of the comments fell for that line of reasoning. I'm sorry but I'm baffled. By unrelated things, I mean things like cases where a driver wasn't prosecuted for hitting a cyclist without hi-vis on and that they hadn't done as much research as the writer would have liked before working on it.

I for one want to thank Volvo for this! It's fantastic! Great idea! Thanks for following through on it. Please keep working on this and other safety-realted projects - no matter how much a couple people might hate that you do.

If I understand some of the subtext right, they even gave much of it away for free! Wow! Way above and beyond in your research here. If in this initial trial, you found it didn't sustain rain well, I hope you'll stick with it and continue to improve on that. If a Microsoft engineer creates a new app that only he finds useful, we all praise the innovation and moving the ball forward. I don't see what's different here. That step often comes before all sorts of expensive testing, studies, and marketing research. We certainly wouldn't expect a company to do that research on the hundreds of ideas that don't end up having legs.

Calling for Volvo to stop making cars because they provided a safety product for bikes is like the hungry man who just received a sandwich from a concerned person (who looks like a banker) throwing it on the ground and stomping on it because he hates banks. I just will never get that line of reasoning.

Hope my 2 cents help here.
KQ

Its just a PR stunt. It costs about £150,000+ to have front and back covers inside the Metro and around £250,000 for a full wrap.

This gets a great deal of coverage for Volvo, and to produce a few cans of paint to giveaway is pennies compared to the above prices.

What next, boiler suits for women to wear on a night out to prevent rapes?

Another London centric advertising campaign of no real use to anybody. If Volvo were really concerned they would have trialled the paint in the Highlands & Islands where the change to BST has had a real detrimental effect in the morning, but that would have involved real research & no cheap publicity. It's also noticable that the paint was realeased as we changed to BST so it can't be trialled in dark winter conditions. Shame on you Road CC for falling for this advertising scam.

If Volvo were really concerned to save the lives of cyclists, they would be making cars that were lighter, slower, lacking in driver protection and fitted with mobile phone blockers.

Clearly much better to blame the victims for the criminal violence and idiocy of the twunts who drive their killing machines.