Volvo Has a Moose Dummy. America Has 2 Million Deer Crashes and No Test at All.

The dummy weighs 794 pounds. It is built from 116 rubber discs threaded onto a steel skeleton, third-generation design, calibrated to replicate what happens when half a ton of ungulate meets a windshield at 50 mph. Volvo has been slamming cars into this thing since the 1980s.^[1] The reinforced A-pillars in every current Volvo, the high-strength steel roof beams, the seatbelt pretensioners that fire on animal impact, and all of it traces back to a test lab in Gothenburg and one very battered rubber moose.

Now ask Ford if they do the same test. Dan Barbossa, a Ford spokesman, told USA Today in July 2026 that Ford "does not do crash testing for large animal impacts."^[2] Full stop. GM's spokesman Kevin Kelly declined to comment. Stellantis issued a statement about being "committed to delivering vehicles that support evolving customer expectations for safety" without answering the question. Three of the four largest U.S. automakers, and the best answer any of them could manage was a corporate non-denial.

The federal regulator is not testing either. NHTSA confirmed it has no applicable safety standards for large animal crashes.^[2] Their crash test suite covers frontal barriers, side poles, rollover resistance, pedestrian head impact. Not animals, and the reasoning makes a grim kind of sense if you are strictly counting bodies: of the 36,297 fatal crashes in the United States in 2024, exactly 204 involved a collision with a live animal, domestic or wild.^[2] That is 0.56%, a rounding error in the fatality ledger.

Fatalities are the tip of a very large, very expensive iceberg, though. The National Park Service estimates animal-vehicle collisions kill roughly 440 people, injure 59,000, and cause more than $10 billion in economic losses every single year.^[3] State Farm processed 1.7 million animal collision claims between July 2024 and June 2025 alone, and insurers estimate claims only capture about 81% of actual collisions.^[4] The true count sits around 2.1 million. Michigan logged 58,324 motor vehicle-deer crashes in 2024. One state, one species, 160 collisions every day.^[5] In rural states like Wyoming, animal crashes represent nearly 20% of all reported collisions.^[6]

Volvo tests for this because Sweden forced the issue. The country sees about 70,000 large-animal collisions annually, 5,000 to 6,000 of them with moose, and a moose through your windshield at highway speed is not something you walk away from in a car that was not designed for it.^[1] In November 2025, a Swedish man named Adam Dresh hit an 880-pound moose at 50 mph in a rented XC60 during a snowstorm north of the Arctic Circle. The car's large-animal detection system spotted the animal before Dresh did, initiated braking, retracted his seatbelt, deployed the airbags, and stopped the car. The moose died, and Dresh walked away without a scratch.^[2]

The structural lesson is worth stating plainly. A moose's body mass sits above the hood line. Hit one at speed and the legs collapse; 800 pounds of torso lands on the A-pillars, the roof header, and the windshield — not the bumper and crumple zones that absorb frontal barrier impacts. A car engineered exclusively against NHTSA's test suite handles the load path wrong because nobody asked it to handle this one at all. "The safety cage design needs to be designed accordingly," said Thomas Broberg, Volvo's senior safety expert.^[2] Designing accordingly requires a dummy. Volvo built one; Ford, GM, and Stellantis did not.

A University of Washington study published in Current Biology found that the annual fall clock change triggers a 16% spike in deer-vehicle collisions because deer are 14 times more likely to be struck in the two hours after sunset than before it.^[7] The researchers calculated that permanent daylight saving time would prevent 33 human deaths, 2,054 injuries, and $1.19 billion in collision costs per year. Congress has considered permanent DST several times, but it has never considered requiring automakers to crash-test for the animal that causes more collisions than any other single road hazard in North America.

NHTSA tests for the ways you die, not the ways you crash. That distinction matters less to the 59,000 people injured each year than it does to the agency's budget priorities. Volvo looked at the problem from the other direction and spent four decades engineering around a rubber moose. Everyone else is selling you a car that has never met one.

What to do about it: If you live in West Virginia, Montana, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, or Michigan (the five highest-risk states for animal strikes), buy a vehicle with reinforced A-pillars and strong roof structures. Volvo is the only manufacturer that openly designs and tests for large-animal impacts. Make sure your insurance includes comprehensive coverage; liability and collision policies do not cover animal strikes. After dark, use high beams whenever legal and watch the road shoulders in November, the peak collision month. If a deer appears in your lane, brake hard and hold your lane. NHTSA and State Farm both advise that a controlled impact with a deer is almost always safer than swerving into oncoming traffic or a ditch.^[4]

Source: NHTSA fatal crash totals for 2024 (36,297 crashes, 204 animal-related). National Park Service and State Farm for total collision volume. Volvo testing claims are on-the-record from named Volvo engineers. Ford, GM, and Stellantis responses are on-the-record to USA Today. See methodology for caveats. Limitations: This article relies on NPS and State Farm estimates for total animal-vehicle collision volume, which carry inherent uncertainty. FARS captures fatal crashes only; the 204 animal-related fatalities may undercount incidents where animal avoidance (swerving) caused the fatal crash but the animal was not the coded first harmful event. Volvo’s structural advantages in animal strikes have not been independently verified against competitors in standardized testing because no such standard exists.