CITY SMART / How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California : Engineer Takes the High Road on Car Interiors

However noble, the notion that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp is anathema to Jim Ulrich.

As an engineer who designs automobile interiors, Ulrich’s philosophy is that nothing should be out of reach.

Ulrich, who works for Saturn Car Co., likes to think of himself as the guy who keeps car buyers coming back.

Designing a car interior is a mixture of science and common sense, a process that employs ergonomically correct mannequins, data tables and computer simulators. It also requires a lot of listening.

“It’s probably not very glamorous,” Ulrich said. “But it makes a difference.”

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For a long time, no one paid much attention to how cars felt. That they worked at all was enough. Stuff just went wherever it happened to fit.

But the whole concept of interior space changed after World War II as car designers borrowed concepts from military aircraft cockpits.

Slowly, a logical system of placement emerged, a standardization that dictated at least informally where speedometers, gas gauges and accessories such as cigarette lighters should go.

Now, designers factor in sight lines and reach limits with complex mathematical formulas to ensure that a mass-produced car can accommodate drivers of most shapes and sizes.

The Mazda Miata convertible, for example, was designed to fit the body types of 95% of American male drivers and 50% of female drivers, said Tom Matano, who heads the company’s research division in Irvine.

Within those limitations, Mazda engineers had to design an interior in which gauges were visible through the steering wheel whether the driver’s seat was pushed all the way back or all the way forward. Radio controls made it as easy to switch stations as to turn on the headlights.

In a sporty little car like the Miata, engineers can compromise on the creature comforts.

For instance, a family that buys a minivan wants the back seats to be as comfortable as the front so the kids won’t spend the entire trip across the country whining.

But empty nesters with the coupe won’t mind if the back seat is barely big enough to hold a couple of tennis rackets.

“People who want a very sleek sports car tend to be more tolerant,” said Ulrich, adding that engineers are as cognizant of psychology and human nature as they are of optical ellipses and angular geometry.

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Color, for example, can help a car be perceived as roomy or cramped. Dark colors tend to feel confining so even cars with black interiors tend to have lighter liners along the roof to create a feeling of space.

At Saturn, Ulrich and his team studied buyers’ driving habits and found that they fiddled more with the radio than with climate controls.

So engineers switched the two, putting the radio atop the heater and air-conditioning switches.

And because people don’t like to be reminded that they bought the cheapest car on the lot, designers recently have moved away from dashboards designed with space for every feature under the sun--including the options the car buyer didn’t go for. “Potential buyers don’t want all the blank squares,” Ulrich said.

Nor do they want all the bells and whistles that epitomized many cars in the early 1980s, when a dashboard blazed with more readouts and lights than some airplanes--”Tokyo at night,” Ulrich called it.

The move now is toward simple consoles. But the simple-looking result is actually something car companies are spending millions of dollars to make ever more efficient.

In the future, cars will be designed with more than just creature comforts in mind.

Dave Viano, principal research scientist for General Motors’ Research and Development Center in Detroit, said that as scientists better understand how humans evolved, they can better understand how to design cars that fit.

“The way we are, the way we evolved over the millennia, is the product of what we do,” Viano said, explaining that engineers are experimenting with seats that shift subtly during long trips to keep drivers comfortable and alert.

“For us, the goal is to make the car match the form and function of the human body.”