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It’s as much suburban shorthand as the drive-thru and soccer moms, yet the days could be numbered for that beloved workhorse of the Canadian winter — the Volvo station wagon.

After announcing its demise in the U.K. — where it’s known as an estate car — speculation is mounting the company’s Chinese owners will withdraw it also from the North American market.

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Volvo has an abiding history in this country: it gave us one of our few homegrown rides — the Nova Scotia-built “Canadian” sedan, which rolled off the assembly line in 1963.

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Renowned for its commitment to safe motoring, the Swedish automaker — and Swedes in general — are also hailed for their design esthetics. They gave us Ikea — how could they not?

Stylish as those Scandis are, they’ve given the world one of its least sexy objects of desire: the three-point seatbelt.

It may be as pulse-quickening as a TV test pattern, but it was one of the most important safety advances in automotive engineering. Introduced six decades ago, in 1959, it has saved an estimated one million lives.

Next time you belt up, tip a hat to Volvo boffin Nils Bohlin, who overcame strong resistance to push through the rather ungainly device that would become standard equipment on vehicles worldwide and cement Volvo as a byword for safe motoring.

A former aircraft engineer with Saab, Bohlin was inspired by airplane ejector seats. He knew an effective restrain system needed to be robust enough to absorb powerful forces, yet easy enough for a child to operate.

In an interview shortly before he died in 2002 at age 82, he said: “The pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash. But regular people in cars don’t want to be uncomfortable for even a minute.”

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For something so many of us take for granted, it was that reluctance to change — to wear something that feels awkward and even silly — that proved one of the biggest stumbling blocks to seatbelt acceptance.

Before Bohlin, seatbelts were rudimentary aircraft-style lap restraints. Early versions were dismissed as a pointless and dangerous fad following reports in the 1950s of motorists being killed, maimed or trapped by their seatbelts.

Many refused outright to buckle up, especially when early shoulder-strap prototypes decapitated a few crash-test dummies.

Wisconsin-based Nash automaker, now defunct, is widely credited as being the first to sell cars with factory-installed seatbelts, in 1949, with Ford offering them on select models in 1955. Mostly, however, car manufacturers chose to make it an optional paid accessory.

As far back as 1885, basic seatbelts were being used in New York City taxis. But Edward J. Cleghorn’s cumbersome contraption — with hooks securing riders to a fixed object — has more in common with a medieval dog leash than a safety restraint.

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In 1958, aided by the work of Swedish engineers Bengt Odelgard and Per-Olof Weman, Bohlin had perfected his design and was appointed Volvo’s first safety chief. The following year, the three-point seatbelt was introduced on the PV544 and Amazon models.

Throughout that decade Bohlin and his bosses at Volvo became obsessed with making its cars safer, hurtling dozens of perfectly fine motors into brick walls and having race-car drivers risk their lives in high-speed rollovers.

What drove them? In one theory that would evoke a knowing nod among Canadians, it was Sweden’s meandering moose and icy roads that thrust car safety to the fore.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the seatbelt story is what Volvo and Bohlin did next. Despite holding rights to the world’s most important safety innovation in the 120-year history of the automobile, they effectively gave it away. Believing seatbelts would save countless lives, they declared an “open patent.”

As the auto-tech blog SlashGear.com has pointed out: “Bohlin’s invention could have been Volvo’s golden egg-laying goose, allowing it to earn millions or billions of dollars in licensing fees and royalties.”

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By 1963 all of Volvo’s lineup, came standard with three-point seatbelts, and within five years they were installed in cars throughout Europe and the U.S.

The V-shaped harness system would be hailed by German registrars as one of eight patents to have the greatest significance for humanity during the century from 1885 to 1995, placing Bohlin alongside such luminaries as Benz, Edison and Diesel.

There remain holdouts — seatbelts only became mandatory in Alberta in 1987 — but widespread legislation has driven the naysayers to the margins, shifting them from safety add-on to social norm.

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1974 letter-writers to the Toronto Star, reacting to possible legislation, were far from bowled over by Bohlin’s invention.

Wrote one: “Lap belts are bad enough and a nuisance to boot but don’t even mention shoulder harnesses to me. Not only are they uncomfortable but I think they’re dangerous … Our society has become soft and overprotected; if we’re not careful, we’ll legislate ourselves right into boredom.”

Bohlin was unrepentant and his creation now rests proudly — still attached to the seat of a 1961 Volvo PV 544 — at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He continued to serve Volvo until the mid-1980s and in 1999 was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, followed by the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.

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On its 60th anniversary in 2019, Forbes said: “It is a refreshing story of design ingenuity, corporate entrepreneurship, and capitalism with a conscience. This doesn’t happen very often.”

Its SUVs, crossovers and endangered station wagons may be world-leaders in dodging moose and taming black ice, but Volvo will never have motorists salivating as they would over a Ferrari or a Porsche.

No matter. The Swedish automaker, owned by Geely since 2010, and its visionary safety chief will be remembered not for their flair but for their foresight.

As the company states: “It’s why we like to say there’s a little but very important part of Volvo in every car.”

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