By Leow Ju-Len

AN EYE-OPENING exhibition on child safety is about to become a permanent feature at the Alexandra Road showroom of Volvo distributor, SM Motors.

The exhibition will anchor a new ‘Safety Café’ in the showroom, which is part of a broader renovation plan for the premises. The upgrading work began this week and is scheduled to be completed by February 2005, with the Safety Café due to open around January.

The Safety Café will make use of interactive booths, multimedia displays and video projections. “It’s to educate parents as well as kids on the various aspects of child safety,” says a spokeswoman from SM. “Awareness in Singapore is quite low.”

Apart from highlighting the proper use of seatbelts, the exhibition hopes to get various facts across.

Interactive weighing scales show how much force a person’s body carries at various speeds, for example. A simple stack of chairs demonstrates how a 30km/h impact is like falling off a four metre height for an unbelted child.

The various items in the Safety Café are from The Volvo Child Safety Exhibition, a travelling display that was featured the Road Safety Carnival earlier this month.

Installing the exhibition in the showroom is part of an ongoing push by SM Motors to raise child safety awareness among customers. The company has also begun distributing a handbook to showroom visitors, entitled “Children In Cars”, free of charge.

There are only a thousand copies or so available, but SM is considering ordering more.

SM Motors says that once the Safety Café is open, the public is generally welcome to learn more about the subject there. “It’s mostly for customers, but it would be useful if they were to bring their friends,” says the spokeswoman.

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