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<div>Occupant packaging is one of the key tasks involved in the early architectural phase of a vehicle. Accommodation, as a convention, is generally considered related to a car’s interior. Typical roominess metrics of the occupant like hip room, shoulder room, and elbow room are defined with the door in its closed condition. Several other roominess metrics like knee room, leg room, head room, and the like are also specified. While all the guidelines are defined with doors in their closed condition, it is also important to consider the dynamics that exist while the occupant is entering the vehicle. This article expands the traditional understanding of occupant accommodation beyond conventionally considering the vehicle interior’s ability to accommodate anthropometry. It broadens the scope to include dynamic conditions, such as when doors are opened, providing a more realistic and practical perspective. As a luxury car manufacturer, it is important to ensure the best overall customer experience at each touch point of the vehicle. When the customer enters the vehicle, there should be sufficient space provided by the door opening angle for a comfortable entry. The larger the opening angle, the better is the “entry accommodation” and vice versa. However, a wide-open door also necessitates the customer to bend more, after being seated, to reach its handle and close it. Thus, it becomes a compromise between what is possible as accommodation while the customer is entering the vehicle and how easy it is to close the door after being seated. The same logic holds good while the customer opens the door and exits the vehicle. This article aims to develop a customer loss function (CLF) between the two conflicting criteria by considering relevant anthropometric distribution of customers. This study focuses on driver compartment and the methodology developed is also pertinent to rear compartment with minor adaptations. Since driver’s seating position is heavily dependent on anthropometry, finer details of occupant seating position are also considered in this study. CLF developed in this article will help the designer and packaging engineers in making informed decisions on the door opening angle, by being conscious of the customer loss/gain for defined performance metrics.</div>
<div>Occupant packaging is one of the key tasks involved in the early architectural phase of a vehicle. Accommodation, as a convention, is generally considered related to a car’s interior. Typical roominess metrics of the occupant like hip room, shoulder room, and elbow room are defined with the door in its closed condition. Several other roominess metrics like knee room, leg room, head room, and the like are also specified. While all the guidelines are defined with doors in their closed condition, it is also important to consider the dynamics that exist while the occupant is entering the vehicle. This article expands the traditional understanding of occupant accommodation beyond conventionally considering the vehicle interior’s ability to accommodate anthropometry. It broadens the scope to include dynamic conditions, such as when doors are opened, providing a more realistic and practical perspective. As a luxury car manufacturer, it is important to ensure the best overall customer experience at each touch point of the vehicle. When the customer enters the vehicle, there should be sufficient space provided by the door opening angle for a comfortable entry. The larger the opening angle, the better is the “entry accommodation” and vice versa. However, a wide-open door also necessitates the customer to bend more, after being seated, to reach its handle and close it. Thus, it becomes a compromise between what is possible as accommodation while the customer is entering the vehicle and how easy it is to close the door after being seated. The same logic holds good while the customer opens the door and exits the vehicle. This article aims to develop a customer loss function (CLF) between the two conflicting criteria by considering relevant anthropometric distribution of customers. This study focuses on driver compartment and the methodology developed is also pertinent to rear compartment with minor adaptations. Since driver’s seating position is heavily dependent on anthropometry, finer details of occupant seating position are also considered in this study. CLF developed in this article will help the designer and packaging engineers in making informed decisions on the door opening angle, by being conscious of the customer loss/gain for defined performance metrics.</div>
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Ergonomics plays an important role in automobile design to achieve optimal compatibility between occupants and vehicle components. The overall goal is to ensure that the vehicle design accommodates the target customer group, who come in varied sizes, preferences and tastes. Headroom is one such metric that not only influences accommodation rate but also conveys a visual perception on how spacious the vehicle is. An adequate headroom is necessary for a good seating comfort and a relaxed driving experience. Headroom is intensely discussed in magazine tests and one of the key deciding factors in purchasing a car. SAE J1100 defines a set of measurements and standard procedures for motor vehicle dimensions. H61, W27, W35, H35 and W38 are some of the standard dimensions that relate to headroom and head clearances. While developing the vehicle architecture in the early design phase, it is customary to specify targets for various ergonomic attributes and arrive at the above-mentioned dimensions. In general, specifications that relate to headroom are only a consequence of static assessments carried out inside a laboratory and not on real-time driving condition. The static assessment can be as simple as positioning a digital manikin in CAD environment and then specifying how high or low the interior trim of the headliner be to achieve a certain head clearance. In actual driving scenario, the vehicle would experience rough terrain. In such cases, the road undulations can displace the occupant from their normal seated position in effect reducing the head clearance. Therefore, it is important to understand this dynamic variance of head clearance on actual driving condition. Undertaking a volunteer test to study this variance comes with risk of endangering the participant and has other measurement related complexities. Hence, we adopt a simulation-based approach for the same using Human Body Models (HBMs) of different anthropometry, which are proven having high bio-fidelity. The aim of this study is to validate this hypothesis and develop a head envelope for drivers considering dynamic road conditions, thus enabling vehicle manufactures digitally evaluate head clearance during early development phase. A typical driving scenario with various vehicle speeds on different stochastic roads and braking conditions are simulated using MBS vehicle models and the acceleration signatures from the simulations are used to estimate the vertical lift of driver over the seat. The resulting displaced posture is compared with the normal driving posture and various head clearances are analyzed. The outcome of this work will help in validating and (or) updating the static head envelope and use it for specifying the headroom target for driver in the early phase of the vehicle design.</div></div>
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