It often happens that in pursuit of comfort and security, car manufacturers cross the line of rationality and offer extras that sound more like the fruit of an unbridled imagination than engineering thought. While today we are excited about autopilots and voice assistants, history preserves the memory of a feature that remained on the periphery of public interest, but to this day causes bewilderment in the few people who know about it - the built-in heart rate sensor.
This exotic technology debuted at the beginning of the century in the flagship Volvo S80 through the Personal Car Communicator (PCC) system. The idea of the Swedish engineers was as noble as it was paranoid: if you left your car in a dark parking lot and are worried that someone is lurking in the back seat, the car's remote control can warn you. The sensor picked up the vibrations of a human heart beating inside the car and transmitted a signal to the key fob, which would start flashing red if it detected an “uninvited guest”.
Although it sounds like a gadget from James Bond”s arsenal, the feature never managed to win the hearts (literally) of the mass consumer. The main problem turned out to be its practical application - the probability of someone sneaking into a modern limousine with an alarm without setting it off, but at the same time standing still enough for their pulse to be recorded, was negligible. Eventually, most owners simply forgot about the existence of this option, and it quietly disappeared from the catalogs, becoming a curious anecdote from the times when safety bordered on science fiction.
Today, when cars monitor our fatigue through cameras and analyze our driving style, the heart rate sensor seems like a cute, albeit unnecessary, relic of the past. However, it remains a monument to an era when manufacturers were not afraid to experiment with unconventional solutions, even if they seemed a little intimidating to the average driver. In a world of standardized extras, such oddities are exactly what keeps the spirit of automotive history alive.