Volvo Tandem - Headliner - Road Test Review

It seemed reasonable that the subjects of Scandinavian design and Swedish furniture would come up when talking with Lars Erik Lundin. He's vice president and general manager of Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center (VMCC), the company's Southern California design studio. But the point he wanted to make about IKEA Group, Sweden's wildly successful home-furnishings maker, concerned the management philosophy of founder and president Anders Dahlvig. "He asks that every employee break at least two company rules every day," says Lundin, who likes that shake-things-up attitude. Lundin brings a similar style to his running of Volvo's creative workshop in Camarillo.

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A bunch of the designers at VMCC ride motorcycles, and anyone who does so understands how the lane-sharing opportunities of narrow vehicles rewrite the rules of traffic flow and congestion. The light, maneuverable feel and inherent efficiency of something scaled like a motorcycle also injects a fun factor that makes saving the planet a kick in the pants. So Lundin's merry band wondered if some of that attitude and functionality could be captured in a car.

Their explorations have led (so far) to two forms of a car referred to as the Tandem, for the inline seating of its two occupants. One body (in yellow) is a far-out, separate-fendered notion with strong aircraft echoes about its "fuselage." The other (red) is a slightly more automotive approach to the same package. As they sit, these models are 1450mm wide (about 57 inches), and the VMCC guys say they could now take that down to 1300 (51 inches). That's plenty narrow enough to run two abreast in standard freeway lanes. With a curb weight in the 600 kilogram range (roughly 1300 pounds), performance would be sprightly even without gobs of horsepower. And if that mass is centered as low to the ground as the designers anticipate, the narrow track should not raise special rollover concerns.

The small size and light weight could raise safety concerns, but this is Volvo, and the VMCC team thinks the Tandem's crashworthiness is well in hand. Though energy-dissipating crush zones are tough to engineer into such tiny vehicles, the tandem seating offers unexpected benefits. The occupants are packaged quite tightly fore and aft, with the rear-passenger's feet well up alongside the driver. That leaves enough forward interior space to recover the needed "stopping distance" (the occupants', not the car's) to offset the shortage of crush space in the nose. And locating the humans on the car's centerline gives luxurious amounts of side-impact crush space, compared with situating them shoulder-to-shoulder. With a long-stroke collapsible steering column, four-point belts (criss-crossing the chest), airbags, and proper engineering of the structure, the Tandem's designers are confident the car would be more than just acceptably safe.