Bigger Bodies Aren’t Just for Christmas
Charis Whitcombe explores the lengths that car manufacturers will go to ensure that their vehicles fit people of all shapes and sizes.
It’s not just the festive season – we’re all getting bigger. For example, the average person in industrialised parts of the world has grown by four inches in the last 150 years. This is largely due to better living conditions and improved diet, so watch out for a similar effect in developing countries over the coming years.
This presents a very real challenge for car-makers. If you want to sell a ‘World Car’, you’ve got to make sure it fits your customers – everywhere. The wrong seat travel, cushion shape, headroom, legroom, steering wheel or pedal adjustment could make your product hard to sell in important markets. You’ve even got to consider things like opening height of a tailgate – what suits lofty Europeans might be hopeless in places where height and arm length are shorter. And given the huge worldwide sales volumes that manufacturers need to cover their costs, getting it wrong could be a billion dollar problem.
To make sure its new Focus will sell well in 120 countries, Ford had to be certain that 97.5% of the world’s population would find it a comfortable fit. So they’ve used laser-driven, top-to-toe body scans on a wide range of ages and races to build a database of sizes – and also, of different types of body statures – which is then used to visualise 3D human models in computer simulations, and make sure everyone will be sitting comfortably, anywhere on the globe.
Don’t try this at home, though. For example, 12,000 Germans alone (2.2% taller than Americans, by the way) were analysed in this way, so we’re talking an awful lot of disk space on your family PC.
