What is automotive interior design? Automotive interior design is the discipline of shaping a vehicle’s cabin around the people who will actually sit in it — seating, controls, sightlines, and comfort, all built to fit real human bodies. The interior of the vehicle is designed around the occupant package: engineers start with where the driver’s…
SAE J1050 is the SAE International standard that defines how to describe and measure a driver’s field of view — both what the driver can see directly and what they can see using mirrors or cameras (indirect vision). Automakers use it to evaluate whether pillars, mirrors, dashboards, and other vehicle structures block too much of…
What Is Quality Function Deployment (QFD)? Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a structured methodology for translating customer needs into specific, measurable engineering requirements. Rather than relying on assumptions about what a customer wants, QFD starts with actual customer feedback, ranks those needs by importance, and maps them against the engineering and functional requirements needed to…
What Is the Eyellipse? The eyellipse — sometimes written as eye ellipse — is a three-dimensional, egg-shaped statistical model of where a driver’s eyes are most likely to be located inside a vehicle. Rather than designing around one “average” driver, automakers use the eyellipse to represent a whole population of drivers at once, so that…
What Is the H-Point Manikin? The H-point manikin — also called the H-Point machine, or in its simpler two-dimensional form the H-Point template — is the physical tool automakers use to locate a vehicle’s seating reference point (SgRP), the design point that everything else in the seating package is measured from. SAE J826 is the…
RATIONALE This revision reduces the complexity of this practice by simplifying the General Package Factor (G) equation, clarifying conditions for using restrained and unrestrained reach tables, removing English unit tables, clarifying the G value boundaries between each reach table, describing in more detail how to interpret when a control is considered within reach, and limiting…