Human Factors Analysis of Current Automobile Control/Display Characteristics

This paper reports an analysis of the degree of control/display (C/D) standardization in location, operation, and coding characteristics for 1971 automobiles. For C/D location commonality, between-manufacturer and within-manufacturer and between-car-type designs were compared. For operation and coding analysis, a selected group of C/D was used. With 90% of domestic and 76% of imported cars surveyed, a great variability of C/D designs was found for all three measures. The second part of the study experimentally evaluated four alternate control concepts for passenger car three-beam headlight systems.