Front-Loading of Occupant Ingress-Egress Targets in Vehicle Architecture 2016-01-0004

Achieving comfortable Ingress-Egress (I/E) is a major ergonomic challenge for Occupant packaging engineers during vehicle design. Vehicles should be designed so that the targeted drivers are able to comfortably get in and out of it. Simulating occupant ingress/egress motion for vehicle involves many constraints and capturing actual behavior of human motion is cumbersome. In recent years, there are number of studies to investigate occupant ingress/egress motion and to understand perceived discomfort, influence of specific design parameters, age impact etc. These studies majorly used techniques like real time motion capturing in a vehicle mockup, comparison of joint torques developed during the ingress/egress motions etc., to identify the occupants discomfort aspects. This paper aims to capture the ingress/egress influencing parameters and incorporating the parameters in vehicle architecture layout during concept phase itself considering various anthropometric measurements. The critical areas affecting occupant ingress-egress were identified and the related vehicle dimensional targets as per SAEJ1100 were front-loaded in vehicle architecture layouts. This helps to monitor the ingress-egress targets & ensure minimal design changes during vehicle development phase.