Vehicle Spaciousness and Packaging Efficiency

Event
SAE 2014 World Congress & Exhibition
Authors Abstract
Content
With the ever increasing pressure to improve the fuel economy of vehicles, there has been a corresponding interest in reducing the mass and size of vehicles. While mass is easily quantifiable, vehicle size, particularly the notion of “interior space” as perceived by the customer, is not. This paper explores different ways in which vehicle spaciousness can be quantified and explores new metrics based on customer verbatims. A novel ‘spaciousness calculator’ combines individual metrics to provide a singular holistic rating for spaciousness, useful during vehicle development. Beyond spaciousness, the paper discusses techniques to quantify the ‘packaging efficiency’ of a vehicle; this allows engineers to maximize the interior space for a given exterior size.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/2014-01-0348
Pages
8
Citation
Mehta, R., and Hadley, M., "Vehicle Spaciousness and Packaging Efficiency," SAE Int. J. Passeng. Cars - Mech. Syst. 7(1):105-112, 2014, https://doi.org/10.4271/2014-01-0348.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Apr 1, 2014
Product Code
2014-01-0348
Content Type
Journal Article
Language
English