Students Design Mock-Ups of Super-Safe Cars : Autos of the Future Feature Appealing, Protective Interiors
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently spent $25,000 in Pasadena to develop three super-safe, well-designed cars. The vehicles surely are safe: They won’t move.
Diane K. Steed, who heads the traffic safety administration, waxed ecstatic when she saw the sedentary automobiles, saying: “We really got our money’s worth. Originally we asked the students to give us interior designs that would incorporate safety and yet be appealing. They went beyond our request.”
What the federal agency got for its money were drawings, full-sized mock-ups and ideas about cars from 20 students at Art Center College of Design.
First Project
The 1,200-student school received the agency’s grant “to combine safety features with good design in order to create a marketable car for the not-too-distant future.” It was the first such student research project ever sponsored by the traffic safety administration.
“I think it’s the best $25,000 the agency’s spent in my five years there. It’s fresh ideas. It’s fostering a new community of design. The project produced some very innovative ideas,” Steed said during her recent visit to Art Center for the cars’ unveiling. “It’s awfully exciting and refreshing to sponsor something like this, and I intend to do it again right here.”
Each of the three student-designed cars has its own personality.
Car A is a big family sedan, in the tradition of bygone years when it comes to size but modernistic in design.
Car B is a sporty, little, two-passenger performance vehicle with a novel steering mechanism.
Car C plays mind games to create calm drivers. It employs low-key colors, simple controls, clear lines of vision and other measures to keep drivers from tensing up. A tense driver is a dangerous driver, Art Center students reasoned.
Two of the most important--and invisible--aspects common to the Art Center cars (and to some cars already in production) are motors that slide under the vehicle in case of an impact, rather than being pushed into the passenger compartment, and frames that crush in a controlled manner.
Fold Points in Design
“How a car crushes is what we as engineers feel is the essential safety factor in a car in case of an accident,” said Merkel Weiss, automotive engineering instructor at Art Center. “We gave each of the three cars in this exercise appropriate fold or collapse points in the frames so when the car is hit and the frame moves during impact, the crush occurs in a way that is least likely to intrude on the passenger envelope. The students took extreme care in the three cars to design frames to best protect the passengers.”
Car B, with no steering wheel, is the most obviously radical of the three designs. Not only is the steering wheel replaced by a horseshoe-shaped yoke that curves under the driver’s knees, the seats camber a few degrees on turns so the driver and passenger are more at one with the car, like a rider and his horse or a bicyclist and his bike.
“We tend to do it subconsciously anyway: lean with the turn so there is no bracing against the turn, and we feel a part of the car,” said Keith Teter, chairman of Art Center’s industrial design department.
Cambering seats may make one feel “a part of the car,” but the missing steering wheel may make one wonder if he or she even is in a car.
The bottom of the curve on Car B’s U-shaped yoke is attached to a pivot point at floor level just in front of the driver’s seat. To enter the vehicle, the driver folds the yoke down, so its arms lie flat on each side of the seat. To steer, the yoke is pivoted so its arms are vertical, and the driver grips their extremities and tips them in the desired direction. To lessen the likelihood of over-steering, making the same radius turn requires tilting the yoke slightly further at high speeds than at low speeds.
Other Adjustments
Switches in pods attached to the ends of the yoke’s arms make controlling headlights, turn signals and some other functions a matter of a finger flick. And, of course, there’s no steering wheel to obscure a driver’s vision of the dashboard or the road.
Car C is the most subtly unusual of the three mock-up vehicles. At first it appears to be disappointingly normal, except for an “interior bumper,” which is an upholstered, flexible bar that curves around in front of the driver and front seat passenger, more or less following the curve of a dashboard that’s a foot or so in front of the bumper. In a crash, the front seat occupants would hit the bumper, not the dashboard.
But there is much more that’s new in the four-passenger, rear-engine vehicle than just the flexible interior bumper. As one of its student designers said, the car is “simple and friendly,” and filled with innovations to reduce driving stress, thereby creating safer drivers.
Among the innovations: the driver’s seat is four inches higher than the front passenger’s seat, so there’s no need for the common driver’s complaint, “I can’t see past your head,” when making right turns.
Lyman M. Forbes, operational factors manager for the Ford Motor Co., was on hand to see the cars’ unveiling. Although he said research would have to be done on certain aspects of the raised seat (such as how hard it would be to get into for an elderly person) he noted with admiration, “It looks quite interesting. It’s the kind of thing these imaginative kids come up with and you go away saying, ‘My gosh, I never thought of that.’ ”
Seat Innovations
Seats are ventilated in Car C to eliminate that irritating, sticky feeling so common in cars on oppressively hot days. And the seats are made of material that molds to the body and then reforms for the next person sitting there.
The horn “button” is the entire single, curving panel that attaches the steering wheel to the interior bumper, so it’s easy to find the horn in emergencies.
Steering is hydraulic, so there is no steering column to spear the driver in an accident. “I don’t have any idea how practical the hydraulic steering system is, but I’m very enamored of it,” said Robert Nicholson, chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s crash avoidance research division.
There’s no fumbling for electric window switches in Car C, since the switches are big plastic arrows--up to close, down to open--readily seen in daylight and felt at night. Controls are kept simple: There are no sliding levers to draw a driver’s eye from the road while he precisely adjusts a heater or air conditioner. A single control operates the heater, air conditioner and fan. The radio is high up so it can be operated without the driver taking his or her eyes from the road.
Seat belts pull across the lap. There are no restrictive shoulder straps. Their places are taken by air bags built into the lap belts. The air bags are released upon collision impact, filling in a fraction of a second to safeguard the car’s occupants. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” said the traffic safety administration’s Nicholson.
Comforting Colors
Upholstery colors are soft browns, dashboard lights are relaxing blues, controls are easy to find, there are no flashy computerized digital readouts, shapes are curves not angles--the sum of the car’s parts add up to a non-aggressive automobile designed to help reduce driver stress, and therefore reduce the likelihood of accidents while significantly increasing driving pleasure.
Car A is the biggest of the three vehicles, about the size of a new Chrysler mini-van. The four-passenger vehicle’s size, say its designers, adds to its safety.
A dish including the speedometer, gauges and horn buttons that “floats” in the middle of the steering wheel is Car A’s most apparent innovation. Turn the wheel, and the dish remains stationary. The speedometer and gauges always are visible, since the steering wheel can’t obscure or cast a a shadow on them. Speedometer numbers are large enough to obviate vision problems of drivers who wear bifocals, or who should and do not.
When one shuts his or her door, a seat belt in a plastic sheath automatically moves in front of that person. The system serves as a reminder to buckle up. Anyone choosing not to take the hint, easily can push the sheathed belt out of the way.
For drivers who eschew seat belts, the vehicle’s steering column is designed to collapse in two stages when struck by the driver’s body during an accident, so in a minor accident the column would recede slightly, and upon heavier impact it would collapse more. Even after a crash, the collapsible column’s design allows for steering the automobile.
Seats in Car A are designed so that if the vehicle were struck from the side, the seats would be driven inward, throwing occupants away from the point of impact rather than leaving them strapped to stationary seats and vulnerable to injury from a crushed door or side panel. Headrests curve slightly around the head in another effort to protect occupants of the car from injury during an accident.
Controls for headlights, windshield wipers, and so on, are arranged on two pods protruding from the dashboard like motorcycle handlebars. The bars are adjustable, so any driver can reach the controls without moving his or her hands from the wheel.
The traffic safety administration’s Nicholson said of the car, “The floating speedometer is good and really new, I’m impressed with the seat belt; it is a very neat way of making an active belt seem semi-passive.” Nicholson called the two stage collapsible steering column “a neat idea,” adding, “As far as I know, it’s a new idea.”
There is no way of telling which of the student-proposed innovations will pass the tests of practicality, consumer acceptance, cost limitations and production capabilities, said Steed.
“It’s extremely hard actually to put a finger on any innovation and say, ‘This stands a very good chance of being implemented.’ ” said Richard Hutting, who teaches advanced transportation design at the Art Center. “This was a student project, and not meant to heavily affect the industry. However, I am sure that some of the innovations designed by the students are likely to open the eyes of auto makers who may quite possibly choose to further develop those innovations.”
If any of the innovations do find their way into cars of tomorrow, they will be among many that grew out of Art Center training.
While it is rare for students who are still attending the Pasadena school to have their work appear in production model vehicles, it is common for Art Center graduates to see their work on the road. Art Center, in the words of its president, Don Kubly, “has trained more professional auto designers than any school in the world, and as of today we can say that more than half Detroit’s automobile designers are its graduates.”
