Design for All - Essay - Universal Design for Automobiles

As in many other areas, automotive designers are often squeezed between conflicting demands: safety, structural integrity, performance, aesthetics, fashion, marketing, accessibility. It is often very hard to equally satisfy the needs for all of these demands, and economic forces will push designers into prioritizing one against the others: looks over safety, fashion over accessibility. As automobiles are often the object of fetishistic desires from their consumers (and are expensive status symbols), it is often very hard to convince people to prioritize safety and accessibility when purchasing automobiles, making the market a powerful force against universal design.

Around half of older, frailer folk have difficulty entering and exiting personal vehicles. This is not helped by the trend for sportier designs, either of low ceilinged, shallow seated sporty coupés or sedans that aspire to look like coupés, or of high floored, high seated sports utility vehicles (SUV), vans and minivans. The latter two categories are very often the vehicle of choice for people with limited mobility because of the generous space for wheelchair and other walking aids, but the push for SUV-like looks causes most of these vehicles to have a much higher floor than actually needed in their true usage scenarios.

The back seat of most vehicles (the seat of choice for many people who are being transported by their progeny or next-of-kin) is especially troublesome; aerodynamics push the ceilings down, comfort for the driver (the purchaser of the vehicle most of the time) pushes the seats back and down, engineering dictates the existence of a B-column between the front and rear doors, etc. That makes accessing the back seat very difficult for people with reduced mobility, dexterity and stretch. The best-case scenario for these passengers is the use of the front passenger seat on two-doored vehicles. These are also very sough-after by users of mobility aids capable of transferring themselves from chair to seat. For these users, the ability to access the leg-space between front and rear seat using a single door is especially useful for stowing away a foldable mobility aid.

These two-doored vehicles are often of a sporty variety, though. That makes their front seats usually low and shallow, which limits field-of-view and makes accessing controls farther away, like automatic rear-view mirrors, ventilators and even some less commonly-used lighting controls like headlamp angle regulators, as well as external features like toll booths, parking-slip emitters, intercom buttons and other drive-through features especially difficult to operate for people with limited reach and stretch ability. In these cases, the higher-seated SUVs and vans make for better seating, both from a security/visibility point of view as well as for reaching external road features and farther-removed controls within the car. Some of these constraints can be addressed by optional, remote-operated devices such as wireless toll tags, but those solve a single problem by addressing a symptom instead of trying to solve the positioning problem as a whole.

One class of vehicle that has been approaching the accessibility/positioning problem from the right angle are sub-compacts and electric vehicles. Perhaps because their target groups are more open-minded and less focused on sportiveness, most of these vehicles get some or all of these features right: low floors, high ceilings, upright seating, big front doors (usually the only door in the vehicle, but sometimes associated with special, “suicide” rear doors that open in the opposite direction without a B-column in-between). These features usually make for less sporty looking cars, but make for very universal features.

Staying in the area of visibility, aging takes away lots of sensory sensitivity: low light vision, dynamic acuity, visual field, hearing of higher frequencies and overall, etc. This makes for very dangerous situations where drivers cannot assess distance or speed of obstacles, cannot see approaching obstacles from the sides or the rear, cannot hear sirens, horns or other warning signs of approaching obstacles, etc.

There are several aids being developed and some already deployed for these issues: HUDs, night-vision systems, parking aids, rear-view cameras, collision-avoidance sensors, collision-warning systems and other crash prevention techniques.

Night-vision systems are usually deployed in luxury vehicles and employ one or more special cameras to absorb road information in ways the human eyes are incapable like LIDAR (light detection and ranging) and infrared or heat-sensing. Different systems process this information in different ways, but in most cases the information is displayed on a screen in the dashboard. This can be very useful, but also very distracting. It also lacks any kind of depth of view, making judging distances and avoiding detected obstacles very difficult.

Some collision-warning and crash prevention systems build on top of these sources of information by further analysing them and generating warning on assumptions made by image analysis. They can, for instance, infer that an obstacle is human-shaped and warn of pedestrians in the driveway, or use reflected light as a way of measuring distance and warn of impending collisions. Some of these systems use mixed visual and auditory feedback, which makes them more accessible. Some also use haptic feedback, but some drivers cannot tell the difference between a warning vibration and a mechanical defect or vehicle quirk, so proper combination of visual, auditory and haptic feedback is needed.

Some systems go one step further and connect this collision-warning information to the cruise-control and dynamic braking systems, effectively taking decision faster than a human driver could (even a very capable one with perfect vision and hearing). These vehicles can decelerate, shift gears and even apply selective braking to one or all wheels to prevent accidents. This combined collision-warning and cruise control system is called adaptive cruise control.

Another way of giving visual feedback is in the form of HUDs or Heads-Up Displays. This military-born technology uses images reflected on the windshield to give vehicle information to the driver, diminishing the need for moving the eyes from the road. These systems can be used for common visual information (speed, current gear), warning systems (collision warning, reckless driving, impending mechanical failure) and navigation (turn-by-turn instruction), among others. These systems must be used with care, though, because this information still makes drivers shift focus from the road to the windshield (people with limited fields of view can have difficulty adapting to different depths), can cause information overload (especially for older drivers whose sensory sensitivity is diminished and therefore cannot cope with too much information at the same time). It is best to combine HUDs with auditory warnings and to be very selective of what information must be displayed on HUDs.

Speaking of HUDs and sensory overload, one common on-board technology nowadays is navigation systems. Older drivers lose confidence in their ability for path-finding, choosing to only drive in familiar roads. The ubiquity of navigation systems brings confidence back to these drivers, restoring locomotive capacity by instructing them on unfamiliar paths. Most of these systems rely on stored maps and path-finding algorithms, making them extremely limited when it comes to alternate routing and hazard avoidance, though. More modern systems use external sources of information (internet connectivity, RDS Traffic Message Channel) to adapt to situations in real time. But these systems can also cause information overload, generate misunderstanding and cause even more unfamiliar situations. Some drivers will blindly follow information given by navigation systems disregarding surrounding environmental warnings, like shifting lanes when prompted without checking their rear view mirrors first or making illegal U-turns or conversions attempting to follow the system prompts. Some will be put in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations like driving in highways, making left turns and other driving situations they usually avoid. Adaptive navigation algorithms can learn of these preferences and generate less direct but more familiar driving experiences for inexperienced or older drivers.

Another problem very common to navigation systems is shared with on-board entertainment systems (or infotainment systems, as most integrated, user-faced on-board computing is called nowadays): distraction. These systems take a lot of user input to operate and generate a lot of output, causing distraction, taking the eyes off the road for long periods, causing confusion, etc. Most mitigation techniques are a balancing act between these various perils: simplified input usually generates longer operation periods with higher distraction, shortened distraction periods require multiplexed input techniques that can be confusing. Alternative communication techniques such as voice input and output are very desirable, but are culturally and linguistically limited and are a long ways ahead in development before they can be considered universal. The only safeguard that can really guarantee safety when operating these infotainment systems is to limit their usage by passengers or when the vehicle is not mobile, but both are simply workarounds that generate more frustration from drivers (who are the decision-makers and market drivers, slowing the adoption of these mitigators).

A last area where universal design and vehicle design have still to catch-up to each other is legislation. Many laws can and should be implemented in this area, as leaving marketing forces alone to dictate vehicle design can significantly slow down adoption of very well established academic knowledge on universal vehicle design. Most of the factors analysed above, especially those regarding external and structural design, are caused by marketing efforts nullifying engineering and design efforts to integrate universal design and safety decisions. Like the impact that Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed book had on highway safety legislation and vehicle design regulations in the US in the 1970s, universal design could and should have a significant impact on design decisions for automobiles, but without supporting legislation, there is no way to counter marketing forces pushing in the opposite direction.

Another area where legislation could become more flexible is creating adaptable licensing requirements. Just as most countries have special licensing regimes for younger drivers (like forcing them to signal their learner’s status or drive only on special periods of the day), creating special licensing regimes for older drivers could increase safety not only for them but also for other drivers around. It would also increase older people’s access to mobility by allowing them to retain their license to drive in restricted situations that cover most of their needs (like allowing for urban driving but forbidding access to highways), not forcing them to relinquish their license when no longer fit for dangerous driving situations.

Conclusion

The fast cycle of automotive renovation (although the automobile is a durable good, it has a rather short effective life cycle compared to housing, for instance) allows for very quick adoption of safety and universal design features. Marketing pressures, though, push these adoptions further away. The Trojan horse for the adoption of these design techniques can be the electric and hybrid vehicles. Their status as a niche product and their fresh legislation needs can be used as a way to push universal access requirements to their design features. The smart combination of legislation and fresh market status can push these new vehicles into a status of safe, accessible vehicles that can pull the other, more mainstream automobile categories towards these adoptions as a way to not lose their “cutting edge” when compared to electrics and hybrids.

References

Hakamies-Blomqvist, L., “Research on Older Drivers: A Review,” International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences (IATSS) Research, 20:91–101, 1996.

Steinfeld, E., M. Tomita, W. Mann, and W. DeGlopper, “Use of Passenger Vehicles by Older People with Disabilities,” Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, 19(3):155–186, 1999.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Vehicle Backover Avoidance Technology Study—Report to Congress,” Washington: U.S. Department of Transportation, November 2006.

Preiser, W.F.E, Smith, K. H., “Universal Design Handbook”, McGraw Hill, 2011