Many advancements have been made through the use of technology that give seat manufacturers the capability to provide greatly improved truck seats.
Until recently the design and development of new seating was accomplished primarily through static surveys. Modern technologies available today will reduce cost, development time, and the overall effort associated with utilizing real people to develop a seating project.
In many instances when these seats were placed into vehicles with actual truck drivers riding in them for many hours a day, the drivers inputs resulted in multiple revisions to the original seat to satisfy their comfort issues.
With modern technologies such as computer generated seat modeling, pressure mapping, and our state of the art test equipment such as a six–axis ride simulator, it has become part of any new seat development program to acquire field ride data in specific trucks and duplicate these inputs in the test laboratory. This provides the means to fine tune suspensions, shock absorbers, foam, and other components to provide the best possible ride in the actual environment the seat was designed for, prior to production release.
Through the combined use of computer generated seat modeling and static driver evaluations it has become easier to develop seating contours and feature control locations that are integrated with the actual cab. This allows the seat and cab engineers to work closely to provide ergonomically accessible controls that will help reduce fatigue and improve operator comfort.