CHANGE BY DESIGN

[Music] I know there's business of styling it's really had its peculiar times like directly after the war when we really got carried away that old pendulum was swinging way out there we slathered them with chrome we had three different kinds of colors per car fish tals fish tails and fins the whole shot fortunately I think that we're we have that behind us we have it out of our system and we're actually having to settle down to do some very serious work now the government is trying to find out just what we can do to make a car safe A lot of people were very pessimistic whether we could design a good-look car based on the requirements you talk about the uh people involved thousands and thousands of man hours the expenditure millions of dollars and all you're going to do is when you get through with it somebody's going to crash it exactly right here we go [Music] she's okay at the design center of the Ford Motor Company tomorrow's automobiles are already taking shape they will be substantially different from today's not so much because of designer efforts to initiate changes in appearance but because of the dictates of safety to tell about this new era in automotive design its effect on the men who design Automobiles and on the automobiles themselves reporter David diales was invited to spend some time at Ford's Design Center his first talk was with the director of safety design David wheeler that we as uh viewers readers consumers have just I guess in the last couple of years become aware of the government's increased involvement with Automotive Safety there is that involvement right now well so far there's about a 100 different subjects that have been covered both in advanced notices and in Act ual standards and those notebooks in the back there cover uh many of these but there's about 100 and all and virtually every part of the car has had a standard written about it for example one is indirect visibility uh an indirect visibility is what you see through your mirrors in your car and is your view to the rear through these devices they brought out an initial notice and our first problem was to see what it said so we construct Ed this 25th scale model and uh tried to see in this form what the docket meant to us from 1974 the government required that we saw three lanes of behind the car and we could see it with either one or two mirrors or three if we wish just like we have today we actually built a car full size to show these requirements and in order to get these requirements here we had to raise the Side Glass here we had to raise the back window we had to in fact raise the whole roof of the car about 6 in we put a a normal WID rear viewing device inside but the side mirror to pick up this edge of the target got to be about about 9 in Long which in itself would be a safety hazard sticking out of the side of the car they then said in 1976 you've got to see in fact all five LAN me of the traffic and you can only do it with one viewing device and they actually mentioned in the docket probably a pariscope we have made many mockups of periscopes um we've built cars we've built seating bucks with the different kind of mirror systems in and yet we haven't seen one that we're really satisfied with um our problem is you know if you take forward Vision where does peripheral vision take over and where does rear Vision looking through mirrors we'd like to come up with a complete stand because of this stress now on safety and because this must be done by 74 that must be done by 75 does it alter your whole concept of your job are you so much a style designer now as you thought you were before well I don't like you're saying that I was before uh because many people think of the automotive stylist as he's called and incident this is called The Design Center instead of styling uh as a person who just did the outside and that's not true um what we designed into the car or tried to was desirability and um this is both engineering and appearance uh efforts to make this happen a man doesn't care how things look in front of him if he's not comfortable in his seat or if we put real Dandy letters on the speedometer and you can't read what the numbers are uh we're not getting any place I think that the uh the challenge is exactly that of trying to uh package the functional components in a manner that that are useful and attractive and I think we've done it you know for instance this panel is a far cry from one we had just a few years ago I I think that during the well the late mid and late 50s especially I think a lot of pretty horrible things were done in the name of uh design and styling you know and I think if you compare some of those jukebox instrument panels with this functional layout that you have to agree that we've come a long way one of the problems I guess it's more of a complaint than a problem is serviceability uh getting something repaired that's a very valid complaint I think and um oh maybe 10 years ago we were so busy trying to package all of these components in there as I told you that there wasn't adequate consideration given to having to get them out again uh in many cases I think we assume that if we put in a light bulb for the uh for the speedometer say that it would last forever which isn't true so in the last few years we've set up two things one of them is reliability standards so that we have to have the best possible equipment in there that will last as long as possible and then in addition to that we set up serviceability standards which take every single part including the little bulb that lights the uh speedometer and we've established standards for that that says that we have to be able to get it out and replace it very quickly and easily and uh remarkably enough we've been able to hit these standards right on the nose and every year we take on a little more task to try and better them I don't know whether the government forced it down your throat or well you did it on your own no the service and reliability was our own doing quite a while ago as a matter of fact when you get into the car that you drive to and from work you can't be always happy with that car can you oh I usually don't like it very well it's an old car it's 3 years old when I get it new it's that's because you've been working on three years in advance this and I quite dissatisfied with what we did at that time I think that a designer is inherently dissatisfied with things the way they are that's why he designs he wants change he doesn't accept the way it was done before you're not concerned then that some of the uh standards being set for you outside your industry are going to inhibit you as a creative person as a designer well they're problems they're difficult some of them may be unrealistic and we we negotiating back and forth constantly on these things the um restraining of the occupant in the vehicle um if you were going to ship an egg from one point to another would you put it in a box and at the other end of the Box put an explosive device with a airbag or whatever you want to call it it's just the best way to protect the egg from getting broken when you move it this is really what we're doing with people we're putting them in a container and we're moving this container and container has to be subject to Violent Maneuvers how do you best package this person so we're exploring we think of cars primarily is running into a wall but in this case the car and the dummies are sitting in one place and it's suddenly driven backwards it's a little hard for people sometimes to understand the car is going backwards and it comes out the same as running into a wall the Automotive Safety Research Center is one component of Ford's research and Engineering complex here dummies substitute for people in a variety of simulated crashes one way of developing the engineering principles which set the guidelines for the work of designers a device undergoing extensive testing is the airbag an innovation which the industry has viewed with some skepticism it's a rather dramatic device you can you can see how someone would be convinced that this is the ultimate piece of Machinery there there's two very simple problems one is reliability of its operation and if the airbag went off by accident it would be rather shocked going down the road at 75 mes an hour the other problem is that an airbag for a given size of person a given weight and a given circumstance can be designed to save his life however uh the same airbag doesn't do for everybody so it's not quite as simple as it sounds we're working on it and uh We've uh spended a lot of money a lot of energy and a lot of thought on this subject uh and we are definitely making progress with airbags but they're still nowhere's near anything that you'd want to put in your car we're trying to do a second element that has to either ride in the pillar I understand go up to a d-ring and back down over the shoulder with the Buckle element being hooked together with the seat element that when you pull it out it goes over the passenger and locks up of course to the other end of the seat belt I guess the problem is efforts are also underway to perfect a more familiar device the seat belt one promising Avenue of development is an Interlock system which will not permit the car to start unless seat belts are worn many different approaches to seat belts themselves are also being explored well it's quite large what what bothers us I think from the design standpoint is the fact that it's it's cumbersome it's it does its job it's safe is there a possibility we could reduce the size of this so we could tuck this up into the roof rail and make a smaller element all some of these over here this particular reel is designed to accommodate some 44 in of webbing we now have determined we don't need quite that much we need about 27 in so there are studies being undertaken to try to miniaturize that plus the fact you can make the webbing do more work for you the shorter the webbing if it's uh excessively long like the others it's extremely difficult to get the performance you want the shorter the webbing the more work you can get out of it is that fair though to to force a man to wear a seat belt or a safety heart to say You must wear what if a man doesn't want to isn't that a violation of his constitutional rights at one time this was a a serious question if you remember there U was a case in Michigan about wearing helmets when they rode a motorcycle and they said that uh a man I guess has the right to commit suicide if he wants to or to be unsafe uh or to do things hazardous to his health and there was a serious concern as to whether you could force someone uh to wear a seat belt but the uh benefits are so great and so obvious that really you uh you simply can't give them up uh because it's a little inconvenient for the driver and if we can devise a means that will uh make it easier for the average driver or passenger to wear those in his car and uh perhaps even bug him a little bit to wear those things I think uh it would be everyone's advantage myw and actually sometimes the safety standards uh are for all practical purposes are meant to do the job but then again we're dealing with human beings and our job is to make the human being Comfort comfortable with the safety standard and this is the real bugaboot here because eventually a human being has to buckle this all together in a three-point system and feel that he's safe and is safe and will wear it this is the problem Americans I don't feel want to be restricted we have this problem freedom of travel freedom of moving around uh and to lock a person up and this is literally what you have to do to make him safe if you don't he will flop around inside the cars and do the things that are pictures and crash test show so you have to confine him and he doesn't want to be confined so how do you do this diplomatically comfort-wise appearance wise make it desirable this is this is real tough I wanted to get back on that door we spent time trying to get as much uh character into the lower part of the door to give it a little faster this is the experimental safety Studio Dave rather than being concerned with uh with a production end of it that is meeting the uh latest standards here we're concerned about getting these things into advanced cars and approaching the problem uh very early in the game so that there's an opportunity for us to to think about the thing before we have to build one one of our more serious problems is uh keeping down the massiveness of the areas on the inside of this car everything is massive the doors are massive the instrument panels massive takes up a lot of space it takes away the environment of the occupant sitting inside the car and that's been one of the the main complaints about uh safety Vehicles we don't want to be called Sherman tanks and we're doing our best to avoid that doesn't this open up a whole new can of worms for you as a designer though you mentioned the challenge before yes and frankly I I enjoy this type of work more more uh than being just a stylist I think our job is not to be the uh the flamboyant uh sketch artist and uh do it uh hell high water cuz we like it that way it just isn't going to be that way anymore as in the case of this vehicle the engineers say this is the way it has to be H high water and uh the challenge is for us to make it work the vehicle under discussion is the experimental safety vehicle the ESV as it's called is being built under contract with the federal government for $1 the objective is to develop an automobile that can suffer a 50 mph crash and still have its occupant survive the ESV will also serve as a test bed of new safety ideas some of which hopefully will be ultimately Incorporated in the cars we buy we've made a great effort to try to make this car look as much like a normal production car as we can and specifically not to have it look like a a freak or an experimental sort of a thing uh with the long overhangs that it is uh obvious that it's a different kind of a car but uh we worked very hard it trying to make it look usual as might be expected the experimental safety vehicle begins not with a designer's dream but with engineering Concepts which determine almost everything about the car except how it will look and although the finished safety vehicle will appear usual it is far from usual from the point of view of the engineers who have been developing it dis for the time that it takes to stop you down to no more speed and we came up with a solution that we explained this morning semic collapsable extensions to F and foood which will then partially yield and come back after impact this is made of very high strength steel when it goes through the pole thing deflect but it does not break or bent permanently it's an enormously strong M each engineering Innovation for the ESV is tested in a 50 mph crash frame just and make up a complete crash car course fenders will be added the hood will be add it obviously this structure has something to do with our energy absorption again as this thing impacts it collapses into a very compact member the force is transferred through those reinforcements against the firewall and its reinfor structure I see the point you're making you had the accordant effect over there but the accordion effect here but why is all this necessary why can't you design something that's just sturdy enough or strong enough just to resist the crash rather than having it absorb the energy that's a very very good question in order to arrive that's any livable and survivable deceleration for the car it takes time in other words the more distance you have like today if you have to stop in front of another car the more distance you have the much more leily can you decelerate your car could I compare it to putting on one's brakes putting them on like that you're going to thrust put them on slowly you can decelerate as youself that is exactly the point yes and for comparison if you ever have a panic stop to make you know what it means how you feel being thrusted over the deceleration we are after here is 40 times that high and considered a survivable condition further down here of course we do not want any crashing to take place this is a living room for the passengers and Driver this has to stay intact from all sort of crashes sideways rollovers front and rear the bumper is really now the low transfer mechanism to affect the stopping of the car at this predicted rate one of the most rigorous tests for the safety vehicle is a 50 mph crash into a steel pole does its part in stopping the car by wrapping itself around the bumper and pulling the whole body into any deformation is absorbed energy these cars do look like a disaster but they look like a minimized disaster and that's what we're doing uh it's still a disaster when somebody hits a pole but we're making a little less someone mentioned this morning that we may not have enough space for register for the last layout there this appear that way I can't see any differentiation this one it's this on the left here uh when you when the pad slopes down over the top of this register the airbags right in here and there's not enough room for register and connection as the airbag and a top pad this is a a task force of people from all over the uh Corporation who are involved in one way or another with a car uh we have a man from from body engineering who is responsible for the structures uh we have another man who specializes in the column the collapsible column and how that is to be used simply moving the opening uh for the air conditioning down a couple of inches gets into the heater controls those have to move someplace else that in turn conflicts with something else and and we have a a whole chain of events all of the pieces that go in here uh somebody has to work out where that piece goes if it conflicts with another piece or or some other portion of the structure and this gets to be a serious problem it actually takes in some cases longer to do an instrument panel than it does the entire car and that's because there's so many things in there all crammed together so the problem is coming more and more complex and more difficult every year but there is more enthusiasm among your people in here for this project because it is so demanding and put such pressure on them I with it I think that's true and also because it gives us an opportunity to do different things uh maybe we wouldn't have allowed putting an instrument in a given place but because there's no other place for it now it's acceptable many of these safety things because they force you to change uh how you would think about doing a car may actually provide an opportunity to get a completely new and different look just because the rules have changed the lessons to be learned from the ESV are for the future of more immediate concern are government regulations affecting the production cars of today for most 1973 cars front bumpers must be able to withstand impacts of 5 m an hour with virtually no damage and apparently modest Innovation with some large consequences our bumper on the 72 Torino is a good example it is uh fully integrated styled with the body bumper uh the effect was to get a the look of the European sporty car in fact the bumper here because of the high styling is almost lost isn't it it uh functions more as a decorative than as a totally functional part why all this style changed Why didn't come up with a bumper before that was uh more functional and safer our buying public seem to prefer the cars that uh were prettier looking and uh as one company would move into a prettier looking car then the next company would follow well this car actually uh gave you more problems I guess than any others because of the bumper situation and you came up with a high style bumper so how did the change evolve after the government sort of all right Came Upon you the the government said in 1973 we want you to meet a certain testing standard and they specified the standard and our Structural Engineers went to work on this problem and they came back to tell us what they thought they needed in order to meet the requirement basically it was to put a very thin or a very simple bumper section approximately here in front of the car it had to be far enough out that it could absorb shock it had to be relatively uh plain in section vertically so that it could not override other bumpers and we went through lots of sketches as you can see on the hook this is one of them you uh looked at and obviously threw away I guess yeah we you said we put a parking light underneath the headlight but we couldn't get enough pipe without changing a major portion of the structure of the front of the car so this one didn't work right that that didn't work all right this is the kind of thing that we then started zering in on let's we said let's take our headlights we'll move them outboard we'll take our parking lights and we'll move them out of the bumper into the grill we'll have our very simple bumper we'll primarily work with the style of our mouth and uh what we can do in our Fender ends dust of bumpers changed that much about the total concept and appearance of the car right yes it uh I think it amounted to 108 lb or so the first bumpers but also it got back into the suspensions into the into the uh tire size it affected the weight of the car many things telegraphed themselves all the way through the automobile as a result of what happened up here in front through a lot of trouble to finally get to what we see over here I guess we sure did it's the answer that we know that meets the requirement to our knowledge today and to the requirements that our engineering people think we should meet they with all the standards being set for you and with the IDE ideas that you have on your own here and all your people what can we expect as consumers what are we going to buy when we go into that showroom two three years hence well certainly you're going to have a safer car there's no question of that uh with the uh uh things that we've done to the interior of the car and the restraint systems uh you're going to be safer in an accident you're going to have a car that will um get less damage in a small accident uh with the bumpers uh for an that fewer repair bills than maybe less expensive repair uh but I think also uh you're going to have a a heavier car perhaps a car that will cost a little more to operate uh take a little more gasoline and it's going to cost you more initially in order to have these things I I think we're going to get into the next phase of this whole thing which is interesting and that's going to be the consumer reaction to what they've asked for and other words a consumer has through his uh Congressman if you will uh made some things happen these uh after the lead time goes by are going to show up in the street and then the consumer is going to have to make the decision if this is indeed what he was when we got on the outside P came down then the airbag wasix so we refolded it and now it sticks out right where the register is a flashlight there