In-house seat design ensures comfort and quality.
Instead of outsourcing seat design, the automotive industry norm, Ford created a dedicated seat engineering team within its Body Engineering division. Three Ford engineers – Qin Pan, Joanna Rakowska and Michael Medoro – spent months working with sophisticated virtual technology to design in-house vehicle seating that maximized both comfort and quality.
For the Ford Flex, the objective was to reflect the quiet luxury of the interior by reducing seat vibration. Using real-world road surface data, the Ford engineers could design mass dampers to counter a variety of road surfaces far earlier than ever before in the development stage.
While the new in-house seating technology has immediate benefits for Flex customers, soon the acquired learning building the F-Family Seats will be applied to a range of Ford vehicles from the Ford Focus to the new Ford F-150.
Tags: F-Family Seats, Ford engineering, Ford F-150, Ford Flex, Ford Focus, interior vehicle design, reduced seat vibration, seat engineering, Technology
