New approach to interior design
New Ford technology allows engineers to shape a car’s full-size interior and looks
A senior automotive design engineer told me not long ago that the next big challenge the industry faced would be to improve vehicle interiors even more dramatically than they’ve been upgraded over the past decade.
These enhancements would include every aspect of interior design - instrument and control layout, seating, sound deadening, quality of materials, entertainment systems and other areas.
Getting behind the wheel of any new vehicle these days - even the least expensive of them - gives me the impression that they could hardly be bettered and that automakers have just about done all they can to create the optimum driving and riding environment. Regardless of type - sedan, SUV, minivan or pickup - today’s vehicles are light years away from those we used to buy 20 or 30 years ago.
But the Ford Motor Company believes they can be even better and to help in the task, the company has turned to some innovative new technology.
Ford has developed what it calls a “programmable vehicle model” design tool, the purpose of which is to “deliver optimum comfort to every Ford interior.” No doubt rival automakers are working along similar lines, but the Ford system is fascinating.
According to Ford’s philosophy on the subject, it’s the exterior of a vehicle that “gets the heart pumping,” but the interior is where we live - where we spend our time commuting, doing errands, taking kids to school or holiday travelling. According to at least one U.S. study, the national daily average time that consumers spend driving a car is 101 minutes - or something like 50 hours a month.
Ford is emphatic about the need for comfortable, well-designed interiors, and few rival automakers would disagree in the slightest way. Something like 82 per cent of buyers who purchase larger Ford cars, such as the new 500, cite interior styling and comfort as “very important” or “extremely important.”
I would guess that buyers of all types and sizes of vehicles rate interior design and comfort highly too. Buyers have come to expect so much from their new vehicles these days that any automaker that fails to meet these demands wouldn’t be in business very long.
Ford’s programmable vehicle model interior design tool, or PVM, is a patent-pending mechanical device that lets engineers quickly shape a car’s full-size interior and look at options for placing seats, controls and other systems. The process gets under way at the very start of a vehicle’s development, so there is no question of having to go back to the drawing board when a prototype is built and found to have interior shortcomings.
The usual method automakers use when they develop a vehicle’s interior is to build what’s called a buck - a three-dimensional stationary mockup of the body built from wood and metal using engineering drawings. These bucks go back a long way and have been used from the earliest days of auto building. The trouble with the buck system is that each time a change is made to the design, another buck has to be constructed. This adds both time and expense to the design and development process.
source:http://autos.canada.com
