Every time a car pulls into a Volvo dealership for any reason, a technician downloads all of its sensors and all of the information it has been accumulating since its last service. That information is then pinged to the Volvo headquarters and added to its expansive data warehouse containing all of the diagnostic data from all of its cars for the past six years -- adding up to somewhere over 1.7 terabytes of data to date. With that data, the company can spot a serious problem, be it a manufacturing or driver-based issue, much sooner, thus reducing the detect-and-correct timeframe for defective, problem or damaged components from as much as eight months to as little as three weeks.
By 2020, Volvo (IW 1000/100) is shooting for a perfect record: zero accidents, zero deaths and zero injuries in any of its cars. To help it accomplish that modest goal, the company has turned to data.