On Measuring Automobile Seat Ride Comfort

A ride number to measure the “ride comfort” of an automobile seat has been developed that could be used to numerically rank nearly all seats. In this research, ride comfort is regarded as the characteristic of the seat that isolates an occupant from annoying road vibrations. The results were obtained from a program where subjects rated a variety of different seats on a paired comparison basis. The ride number is a result of arranging the measured dynamic seat parameters in an empirical formula for the best correlation with the subjective ratings. As a result, the ride number agreed with 67% of the ratings; this compares with a 60% agreement for a ride measure based on the International Standards Organization (ISO) comfort criterion for humans. When similar seats (bucket seats) were considered, the agreement with the ride number was 80%, while with the ISO ride measure it was 65%. The ride number, being “tuned” particularly to automotive vibrations, has shown that, in general, seats need not be heavy to provide traditional ride comfort.