Paper 4: The Skills of the Driver and the Response of the Vehicle

There appears to be increasing acknowledgement of the importance of ergonomics in automobile design but only at the superficial level of seat comfort, panel design, and control positions. This is not to say that these aspects are not important, a reasonable level of research of this kind obviously deserves support but there is, as yet, almost no appreciation of the kind of problems which a professional ergonomist would like to study, given the opportunity and the resources.

Ergonomics is systems design with the characteristics of the human operator as the frame of reference. Automobiles are not ends in themselves, they should be designed to conform to the requirements, abilities, and limitations of the people who are the sole justification for their existence. This includes passengers, drivers, maintenance engineers, pedestrians, and producers.

The passenger problems can be summarized under that useful, if indefinable term, ‘comfort’. This is a question of seat and space design which sounds straightforward but in detail it becomes quite complex. The properties of seats cannot be determined in isolation from those of suspension systems and road surfaces. Although there has been a good deal of work in the last decade on vibration most of it is on the basis of sinusoidal inputs from which any extrapolation to real conditions of wide power density spectra is dubious. Noise levels and heating systems are probably understood to the point where the design compromises are made on a cost basis.

The driver has all the passengers' problems plus those of the handling characteristics of the vehicle. Little is known scientifically about the relative importance of inputs of information through the windows, from the instruments, through the control linkages, and from the various modes of acceleration of the head. The dynamics of steering systems is another potentially fruitful area when related to human performance.