Volvo has been synonymous with exceptional safety standards long before technologies like blind-spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warning became commonplace. The company has even gone so far as to limit all its cars to a top speed of 112 mph and has performed some of the industry's wildest crash tests.

To drive home its commitment to safety, the company has announced that its new fully electric flagship SUV will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology that includes LiDAR and an autonomous driving computer. Improved over time via over-the-air updates, your car could theoretically become safer the longer you have it.

These technologies will be found in the fully electric successor to the XC90 that will be revealed sometime next year and this means they'll likely filter down to smaller models like the XC40 Recharge in the future and the newly announced electric XC60 successor. Volvo says that the technologies are specifically designed to reduce many of the severe injuries and fatalities still caused in certain traffic situations on the road today.

Developed by Luminar, the LiDAR system and the autonomous driving computer powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip will be standard. Volvo's own autonomous driving software development company, Zenseact, developed the Highway Pilot feature that enables autonomous highway driving in legally verified locations and only under certain conditions.

Along with the advanced sensor suite and AI computing tech, the new EV will also get a backup system that can control functions like braking and steering. The system works together with LiDAR to enable Highway Pilot.

"In our ambition to deliver ever safer cars, our long-term aim is to achieve zero collisions and avoid crashes altogether," said Henrik Green, Chief Technology Officer at Volvo Cars. "As we improve our safety technology continuously through updates over the air, we expect collisions to become increasingly rare and hope to save more lives."

While a goal of zero future collisions seems implausible at this point, we admire Volvo's tenacity in chasing safer motoring. More information about the brand's technology will be shared at the Volvo Cars Tech Moment on 30 June.